Terrible things I'd do with your money
timdaub.github.io
timdaub.github.io
The reason is too much cash takes the focus off product and turns it inward and creates a zero sum competition internally among managers to loot the excess money instead of focusing on growth from real revenue. Economically, at least the fire would be deflationary. Cash is literally fuel, and unless you can put it into something that grows, it's a volatile nuissance whose fumes impair judgment. If you want to destroy a product and a company, get them indexed on unlocking a covenant or raising another round where the execs get bonused out of it.
Cash is what you have when you don't have product market fit and (I think) it creates a culture that repels customer desire. Why make anything someone wants when you have enough runway to tinker with what you want for yourself, maybe some follie that you can speak at conferences about, or the best devops and ci/cd pipeline to nowhere?
I'm harsh about this because investors buy a ticket for a growth ride, and the best ones are diversified enough that they really do just buy the ticket and take the ride. But watching engineers iterate on refining the exeuction of solved problems, managers focus on "getting resources," and sales acting like the abused secret side partner to some flagship account they're fronting to attract investor/acquirer interest - are all just spinning wheels, imo.
There are lots of legit complaints about VCs, particularly around financial engineering, and some negative culture issues from the teams they can parachute in, but even as an admitted serial IC technologist, the article embarasses me.
-- that was an incredibly well written and succinct summary of the the dangers of over funding. I couldn't agree more!
Whatever happened to Josh Harris of pseudo/quiet? In that weird but prescient doco "We live in public" he says something like all the guys he knew who made dotcom fortunes "wasted their money" by not blowing the lot on "surveillance art" millennium apocalypse parties. And KLF certainly made a lasting myth, whether they torched the wonga or not.
I am just pondering the power, ethics and potential of conspicuous destruction of ones own wealth. There's something profane in this, in a world where it's getting harder to find. Wouldn't it be funny if Musk bought Twitter, and simply shut it down, and pissed off on vacation with no contactable number.
Obviously not actually plausible, but I got a kick out of his sincerity on the topic. (If you're out there, Dan, hi!)
I've honestly had the same thought rattling around in my head during this entire spectacle. It'd certainly be the boat interesting outcome.
I strongly disagree. Most VCs are very risk averse. They just pattern match to previous success, or "wait for someone to take the lead".
Only the top VCs are risk takers -- most of the rest just follow on for the ride.
Angel investors are much more willing to take risks than VCs.
The risk is not precisely and exactly quantified. The uncertainty isn't precisely quantified. This isn't an experiment where someone is asked "Would you like to have $2, or flip a coin and get $5 if its heads, or roll a die and get $16 if it's a six?"
I think it's more about how they are estimating risk in different areas, and ways in which one might commonly see people overvalue or undervalue risk, or overvalue or undervalue potential payoffs. It's not that they're trying to be more conservative, their incorrect calculation just makes one option seem like a bad (or worse idea) than another.
An alternative viewpoint is that maybe their risk calculation isn't actually wrong and they're not risk averse, they're just taking the strategy of only making decisions that don't make you look foolish and can be blamed elsewhere if you lose, but can take credit when you're lucky and they win.
Saying yes to 2$ over a coin flip to $5 is risk aversion. Saying no to $3 so you can coin flip for $5 is probably just foolish.
That risk isn't quantifiable. But if you're in a national park, you know there is a good chance there is a bridge, so you pattern match what you know about national parks and decide that looking for a bridge is less risky, knowing your priors.
VCs operate the same way. They know that in the past they funded two founders from MIT making a marketplace, so they are far more likely to put money into that again than something from a solo female founder who never went to college.
That's why I say they are risk averse.
You have this huge amount of money that you must dispose of for which you demand x% of return. All those startups can deliver x% returns but they can't use all of your money. So you stop giving them money and instead give it to those that are promising x% and taking as much funding as they can get their hands on, fully aware that they could run their business with much less funding and then you end up with all these absolutely gigantic money losing unicorns with the hope that you can sell them to other investors and let them be stuck with the loss by telling them that some sort of monopoly forms which will make it worth it.
Almost no one wanted to bet on Coinbase in 2012 but everyone wanted to bet on all of these derivative crypto projects after Coinbase and bitcoin were killing it.
Surely not:
> It's there where I'd waste your hard-earned dollars on days of "unnecessary" and tangential work.
> It's where I'd rent servers to compute seemingly useless shit - where I'd blow tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just to gather more, to you, irrelevant information.
There are very few individuals that I would trust to create something of value in an unstructured environment. At the very least, for most people I would want to hear about their approach to foster creative thought, turn that into actionable designs, experiment and discard and iterate.
There's no need for VC money to unleash creativity and create cool things, this is just the author blaming others for their inability to hit whatever weird creative standard they set for themselves. "If only they'd let me I'd change the world". The things that cognitive dissonance can make you believe are incredible.
I have some (to me) fascinating and promising ideas about tooling around managing software specifications. I also have strong opinions about version control and some core ideas about how I'd like it to work.
I'm a primary breadwinner husband and father of three children who lives far from any tech hubs.
That makes it rather difficult to spend much time or energy on those problems to realize the ideas I've got.
I strongly agree that constraints help creativity, but you can have enough to weigh it down rather than help it.
They have jobs and customers just like anyone else, even though many of them don't like to frame things that way. Every fund's prospectus talks about the GPs' philosophy, thesis and focus; every LP talks about their appetite for risk.
The more significant difference I have observed, especially over the last 25 years, is that west coast investors are more afraid of missing out on upside, while investors elsewhere (US east coast, Europe, much of SE Asia except some chinese funds) are more worried about the downside. This makes the west coast more dynamic (more eagerness for a deal, more willingness to get into a deal with less onerous terms or lower percentage) than elsewhere. Also I've found east coast investors far more transactional. These are gross generalizations (I can easily point to exceptions to my own statement) but are generally true in my experience.
Edit: It's missing out on upside that looks like "sheep" reaction. Someone may have a good idea for a product and identify an underserved market. You may like that sector but perhaps you don't like the team, or you can't get into the deal but you can get into a deal with someone else who has a different way to address the sector. That isn't necessarily a "fashion" issue (though sadly it sometimes is). Look at it in retrospect: there weren't integrated circuit startups in 1950 but there were a a few in the 50s and very many in the 70s. Would anyone today consider that "sheep" behavior?
BTW I have no desire to defend the VC industry, but these are what I see.
IHMO the problem to the US-style approach of (relatively) easy money is that for every good startup that comes out of it, you've got dozens or hundreds of at best "Me Too - but slightly different" companies (i.e. minimal competitive differentiators), and at worst snake oil companies doing everything possible to sell unsuspecting customers a product that is far far far too immature and with IT infrastructure burn rates that would make your local Fire Department wince.
In the US if you're good salesman who can tell a good story then you're probably 2/3 of the way there towards getting some funding, there's just so much money sloshing around the system and so much FOMO.
Just to be clear, one aspect of my (GGP) comment was that it's really a California-plus-a-bit-of-China approach that's FOMO -- my experience in doing deals in BOS and NYC is about as bad as in EU.
And for all that I say about California being FOMO: note that Theranos and WeWork were not SV funded (Theranos's sole valley investor was the father of the founder's childhood friends). We work's funding was primarily outside the US.
I believe the main reason is that people in EU in general prefer to invest in bonds instead of businesses / stocks even for long term (where stocks make more sense), but government bonds themselves can't move the world forward.
(OK, actually I did agree with the article in regards to points outside California.)
But I was trying to make two points where I thought the post was not correct:
1 - The "don't want to miss out on upside"-motivated crowd take a lot of risk, sometimes on stuff even I think is absurd...and some of those bets that seem stupid to me do pay out.
2 - There's nuance in what appears to be "herding" behavior so that the "sheep" complaint is...probably wrong.
Again: my comments are supposed to be normative; the VC community neither needs nor deserves my support.
> I dream of not owing responsibility to my employers or financiers. The utopia of creative freedom, where no budget limitations, no sense of scarcity, or fear of failure exists.
> I dream of a place where financiers understand my desire to take risks, a place where not only engineers have empathy towards the business but vice versa.
> It's there where I'd waste your hard-earned dollars on days of "unnecessary" and tangential work.
> It's where I'd rent servers to compute seemingly useless shit - where I'd blow tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just to gather more, to you, irrelevant information.
> If I had all the creative freedom in the world, I'd do "terrible" things with the money you invested.
This guy should get into crypto
The Utopia you describe seems to be “VCs give me unlimited money but I’m not expected to provide them any returns or listen to their suggestions, ever”. I don’t know what to say to that. It sounds like what you really want is to be rich, so you can finance your own experiments.
Like others have said, this blog post would be much more interesting if you described what experiments you'd run if you had money. I think about that myself very often.
The upside is huge. If we can make a robotic system which can safely pilot a vehicle on our existing roads, and make it commercialy viable that will reshape how transportation is done, how cities are built, and how people live.
Is it risky? Oh yeah. Everyone knows that computers are full of faults, sensors are crappy, hardware breaks all the time and every software is a pile of bugs. These are given, and unlikely to just change on their own. Can we, despite all the above engineer a system which provides superhuman level of driving safety, yet it costs less than a driver on the local minimal wage? This is the premise of a self-driving car.
Follow on question: is it possible to get there from here without antagonising the public with accidents? If a restaurant gives food poisoning to folks on the other side of town that won’t affect your restaurant’s business. Any self driving accident happening anywhere on the earth have the potential to ratchet up the scrutiny on every other companies. ( Think of something Hindenburg disaster equivalent.)
I believe the answer is yes we can, it takes carefull engineering and a lot of work but it can be done without needing to invent general artificial inteligence. VCs seems to agree with me because they are positively pumping money into companies in this field. What is that if not risk taking?
VCs are very willing to take that kind of calculated risk. They are also willing to chase crypto and AI due to FOMO (leading to the observed herd mentality).
But in terms of novel ideas that could be game changing but don't have a lot of mindshare or a clear path to market, they ain't touching those things.
Wrap this up in some waffle about cryptocurrency and you’ll have people falling over themselves to give you money.
I'm guessing it's easier for me because I've yet to see a startup out to prove the existence of human needs for thriving and committing to designing a business and culture with that level of awareness, or with the goal of creating an ecosystem capable of meeting all those needs.
And if startups and their VCs are all chasing something else besides the needs to thrive, then aren't they all sheep going after not-needs?
Where's the startup that's like "Human needs? Establishing what those are was the first thing we did when we had this idea because product-market fit is meaningless if we're literally developing a system that denies the existence of needs of the people working here by staying ignorant of them. That's organizationally and societally suicidal."
Fund the Sun Ra Arkestra to keep innovating jazz without catering to whiteness.
Fund systems for giving to everyone's needs, hopefully undermining capitalism.
Create a new currency by defacing old currencies with messages of gratitude and revolution.
The venture (versus scaling) risk is taken by angels and seed investors. A majority of their bets totally fail. Not a down round or bad IPO or acquihire. Totally bust. Zero dollars back.
We have multiple bets in space colonization, genomics, fusion and direct neural interfacing in play in America. I'd be cautious before calling the entire space risk averse. If all you're hearing about is crypto, FAANG and grocery delivery, you may want to broaden your professional circle.
You mean like this bold approach to development?
Programmer: "Please, boss, let me write this one in Rust."
Manager: "OK, but if you are even one day late, you job will be on the line."
Programmer: "Never mind, I'll use Java." Knowing that if three months late using Java, nobody will care.
When you have no budget, you have no budget limitations.
Alternately stated: Be your only investor.
Or, as has been said before me: "Do as thou will"
> The cost of developing the Commodore 64: No one knows. “I had no formal budget accountability,” said Winterble, “other than Jack [Tramiel] watching me. Jack said that budgets were a license to steal.”
I'd like to pay employees $5 each time they high five each other. With no limits really on the amount of high fives they can do. We could use smart trackers on wristbands to count the high fives. Become the highest hive five density office place in the world.
See if we can really prove or disprove all these studies about high fives and the culture of performance. https://www.helloteam.com/did-you-know-high-fives-are-proven...
So, here's why "risk" is so weird and problematic. VCs will take numerical risks (standard deviation) because it is their job, just as some traders will gamble $10M on a 51/49 trade and not feel terribly bad if it goes against them. Almost no one is willing to take a real life-altering risk... and, to be honest, I don't blame them. This is especially true of employees, who are incentivized to be as risk averse as possible: if things go bad, they get fired; if things go well, their bosses profit.
It would be better if we could just admit this and accept it and basically agree that no one should be expected, as a matter of daily living, to put their well-being at risk. Income is a utility; you don't want it turned off. Furthermore, when people are in precarious circumstances, society ought to do what it can to fix that.
Thing is, the rich profit by our culture's lionization of "risk takers", while ignoring the fact that most of the people who hit it big took no real risks to get there. Sure, they could have lost $10,000 of their millionaire daddy's money, or had to call "weird Uncle John" to ask for a VP-level position in a consulting firm, but they weren't taking the real risks that most of us have to take in daily life and get a lot less for. This nonsense prevents us from agreeing that, most often, true risk is a pretty bad thing that we have good reasons not to want in our lives.
Work is what you do in order to gain the resources necessary to play. Work is about using your energy/time to produce something that is more valuable to someone else than the value of the energy/time was to you. Play is about using yiur energy/time for what you want.
The person who grew the food that you eat also would love to do things that are more fun than farming, why did you make them farm to get your money instead of paying them to create art? If you aren’t willing to pay the farmer to do whatever they want, why would you expect someone else to pay you to do whatever you want?
If you want someone else to give you stuff/money that you want, you have to give them something they want in return.
It came from a dream of wanting to be able to do my job, software development, with theorem provers and code synthesizers using interactive assistants and hand-writing recognition on e-Ink devices. It'd be nice to have a space that was truly intuitive in the human-scale sense: a device that isn't a device; that doesn't slowly ruin my body as I adjust myself to it, etc. A device that wasn't co-opted to keep me engaged and spending, spending, spending.
It'd also be nice if I could build these things out of commodity parts with commodity interfaces so that we can up-cycle and maintain these computers well into the future without dumping them every few years for the new shiny.
... it's a distinctly uncapitalist computer which is probably why I'll never be able to build it unless I win the capitalist lottery.
But hey, one can dream. f-u money is what I look forward to.
In contrast, "decentraland" seems like a project involving virtual reality and blockchain/web3 stuff.
"The Screenless Office" was new to me, an intriguing concept.
It makes me think of screen readers, and how I imagine blind people interact with the computer and navigate the web with auditory feedback instead of visual.
> ..if I could build these things out of commodity parts
It feels like you might get pretty far with commodity hardware, like microcomputers, sensors, electronic parts and so on. The software side sounds like years of work though. I can picture it as a long-term passion project, growing a personal computing ecosystem..
Your description sparked some imagination for my own take on the vision, involving MIDI keyboards and instruments with knobs, dials, touch screen; and a projector that turns a whole wall into a computing interface. Some microphones and cameras as input devices, parsing hand and body gestures..
Which is to say, external investment perhaps makes sense when there's necessarily going to deep sunk costs (which correspond to capital like chunks of land, huge amounts of labor, piles of raw materials) etc.
But in the internet age, nah -- which is, your big money companies frequently don't really NEED all this money. So what this really is is just a weird form of risk-play(could be either "gambling" or "insurance" depending on how you look at it) for the rich -- which creates seriously bad incentives; return at all costs?
I feel like it's very risky to do what everyone else is doing in a winner-take-all market.
It seems like part of the problem is that there's too much VC money floating around for the number of opportunities in the market. I'm sure most investors would love an original pitch, but they just aren't getting any. And how can you claim to be a VC if you're passing on every venture looking for your capital? Throwing $1MM at Twitter for Dogs is probably just a cost of doing business, it keeps you in the loop and adds some prestige.
There's an inflection point before which even the losers will get a decent return and after which the company must utterly dominate for the valuation to make sense. Consolidation doesn't come free for the winner.
If it was that easy to come up with unique new viable ideas VCs would be investing in that. But its hard. Has little to do with risk tolerance.
First wherever wealth is accumulated in such excremental proportions that risk itself is no longer (as much of) a factor (eg FAANG-tier companies, ultrarich investors)
Second wherever the need for/value of solutions is judged too high for their development to be contingent on the existence of a viable business model (eg public sector, academia)
Third wherever normally risk-averse people misjudge the risks
It's hard to think of anything else in this mode of production. Innovation is stymied by the threat of precarity, which looms over the vast majority of people. The others must operate either on prudence and sheer volume, or "luck"
They're beholden to funders who, while wanting to see ROI, also want to make sure they're not missing the next big thing.
This FOMO competition means VCs are more likely to jump of a cliff once that first VC makes the leap, because in the off ~1% chance it's a big thing, the VC can't afford to miss it.
Of course. Because the whole point is to cash out when other (later) sheep pile in...
> VCs don't take (enough) risks. And neither do startup founders.
Because investors in the coming rounds are risk-averse and want something they can understand. The VCs just want to cash out.
> The Utopia of Creative Freedom
Lol. Unfortunately it won't last long.
I’ve often chalked this up to founders following the money. If everything is secondary to that — if it’s not for the love of software — you become bedfellows with technical debt and flashy bloatware.
But you have something to write your investors about.
Being antithetical to bloat, I see real innovation in FOSS.
The first part seems to accurately describe the sad state of affairs regarding European VCs that are too risk averse, and, in this particular example of deliveries-by-bike, unoriginal.
But the last part about the Utopia seems like 100% sarcasm?
don’t lament what the world is, but what you want the world to be
... and I'd buy long lasting food and store it in said apartments.
It will be easy having security guarding it, at least for me personally,
and when the time comes, which it will, I'll start making sure people around me have food and water.
> [I] would like to see is increased risk-taking in the workplace [...] I want to blow up the scope [1], but they won't allow me
While I generally agree with the sentiment, let me offer a devil's advocate position to counter the whole "woe is me, I am but a 10x engineer suffocated by the evil VCs and PMs of the world who keep asking for dumb jira updates. If they stopped asking for updates, I'd give it to them in 5 years" narrative.
There are similar criticisms in academia-- "The bean-counting administrators need some dumb metrics (num papers, num citations) for tenureship". While these are valid criticisms, the alternative is not one I'd prefer.
Consider someone who does make grandiose claims, but pushed back against those who ask for "updates" or "metrics". Elizabeth Holmes is cited as one such person with "[going] all-in; mega bold and despite the odds stacked against them". But this example actually is a warning that goes against the point of the article, I feel. The "evil VCs" full-heartedly trusted her. Are you telling me that if the VCs just took more risk, she would have succeeded? But instead, they basically margin called her and screwed her over because they were too risk-intolerant?
W.r.t Holmes, I actually place a small amount of fault on her. It's good to dream big. I place more fault on the VCs for not being "bean-countery" enough, because anybody with proper auditing would be able to see the issues there, instead of blindly trusting "oh this $100mil is for R&D, just trust me. You need to take risks for this world changing blood testing methodology."
The takeaway is-- there's a reason scope might be restricted. In academia, there's a notion of a "publon" [2], the smallest "quantum" of knowledge that can be published (ha! I love that name). The idea is, no matter how large a project might be, it is segmentable, and if it is not segmentable, it's not a good project. Furthermore, publishing is THE mechanism of which scientists get feedback, and feedback is critical to our iteration process.
(Again, as I mentioned, there are tons of problems with the "publish or perish" culture, which I could also go on forever about, but preferable IMO to the alternative of publishing a magnus opus every 10 years).
We can generalize that concept to most things. Feedback and metrics are critical inputs to iteration. You can certainly criticize these metrics, but you can't JUST say "take more risk" without providing alternative data to update a VC's investing strategy. You want them to accept your giant ass scope? Give them better data. Help them help you.
For another example-- Consider a project that's been going on for almost 20 years. Mill Computing [3]. They have established some pretty massive scope, and it's a goal I support. But do we (the public) have much insight as to what they're doing, precisely? Not really. They most definitely have their reasons, I'm sure, but I, as an outsider, know very little about how they are achieving their goal. So then why would I invest in them?
[1]: https://timdaub.github.io/2021/06/18/when-scope-blows-up/