Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex
sequoiacap.com
sequoiacap.com
Edit: Here's a Google Cached Copy https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33...
In case that is past its TTL, try this:https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...
> Update: November 9, 2022 A liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.
“Embarrassingly, we had never tried to reach out to Sam, because we figured he didn’t need us,” Bailhe admits. “I thought they were just minting money and had absolutely no need for investors.” Learning otherwise, they quickly contacted SBF and organized a last-minute Zoom call between him and the partners at Sequoia—at four California time on a hot July Friday afternoon.
[...]
The Zoom went well for all concerned. SBF looked relaxed as he answered questions, talking, as he usually does, in complete paragraphs about topics of extreme complexity. Ramnik Arora, FTX’s head of product and another ex-Facebook engineer, remembers the meeting clearly: “We’re getting all these questions from Sequoia toward the end. He’s absolutely fantastic.”
[...]
That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”
Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. “YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
[...]
“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that f....r was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
i can only hope the actual due diligence at top VCs is much, much more robust and deep than this. If this isn't an extreme outlier and is more the norm than I realized, well, I had way too high hopes for the so-called gatekeepers of the top echelons of society.
Huh? Over a lifetime, both bets have the same expected value. Is there a mathematical explanation why the more risky one is better?
The math...
A while ago, the Freakonomics podcast interviewed Arianna Simpson, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and who manages some of their crypto investments. The host, Stephen Dubner, asked what is now the classic question of 'what problem does crypto solve?' A question you'd expect a crypto investor to easily anticipate.
Her main response -- and I promise I'm not joking here -- was that you could resell access to your home wifi with crypto tokens, mainly to your neighbors.
When pressed further for a more commercially credible response, she engaged in a remarkable attempt to appeal to authority, saying that "if you were in the meetings I'm in...with top founders, from the top schools...you wouldn't be questioning this." But without any further explanations.
From what I could tell, Arianna frankly didn't care about any utility it could provide. If it did provide some, she couldn't name it. But she recognized a grift, and knew she could likely make some money using other peoples' money to get in on it.
To be fair, Andreessen is not an investor in FTX, though they've lost plenty of LPs money in other crypto investments. But this attitude is reflective of the approach of many VCs, including those at Sequoia.
They don't care about the product, or the value created. What they care about is that there's this masterful story-teller with wild hair, that the press will adore, and with an addressable market that seems unconstrained, which is easiest to do when it is undefined. These stories can be flipped for a hundred or a thousand times their original investment not because they generate that much value but because there is a frenzy of momentum and fear of losing out.
And often this works: the market frenzy begins to crest, and they can sell into it. But eventually the wave does crest and crashes down, and they are caught in it. And in the aftermath we look at the enablers, the funders, and their logic looks preposterous, because we assume they care about building lasting value. And we wonder what exactly it is they do, what their purpose is, what value they leave behind.
I also notice that they don't say what proportion of gains FTX was...given that it was $150 into a few billion, it is fair to assume that it was a substantial proportion (and...tbh...that reads as deceptive).
Ofc, they won't die, you have to pay the toll of fees for these guys because they have the whole VC network locked up (to some extent, Sequoia has fallen away a bit more recently). But these funds are just pure beta.
Sequoia should be beyond embarrassed. Yes, their fund is way up. But they did next to zero actual diligence here, and acted like complete fools (and bragged about it!) during the pitch process. Perhaps even worse, they were apparently fine with their investment conveying zero governance, zero board seats and zero information rights.
>>UPDATE: Nov 9, 2022: Since this article was published, a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.
What he and Do Kwon did is far more egregious than Madoff. And perhaps even Theranos’ Holmes. We are living through the Golden Age of Digital Frauds.
> With SBF’s initial $50,000 compounding at 10 percent each day, the next step was to increase the amount of capital. At the time, the total daily volume of crypto trading was on the order of a billion dollars. Figuring he wanted to capture 5 percent of that, SBF went looking for a $50 million loan. Again, he reached out to the EA community. Jaan Tallinn, the cofounder of Skype, put up a good chunk of that initial $50 million.
AFAIK he seemed a decent fellow (but that's 2nd hand) and about par for the trading space. But that was then. Obviously now in hindsight, he seems to have been different in some intangible ways.
My money is on Jonah Hill to play SBF.
What is an LP, mentioned in the update?
https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/20/22335209/sam-bankman-fr...
If he had ever read Atlas Shrugged none of this would have happened :)
“I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Strong Vizzini energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUg2cp23rGE
Here's a couple diagrams of typical VC fund structures:
1. https://www.asimplemodel.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Priv...
2. https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*XPPTuER9ZGAoXSMe544ZUw.pn...
> really puts to rest any notion that elite VCs are smarter or better than the rest of us.
Oh, I was under no other impression. Most of these VCs got lucky in the dot com bubble days and other such scenarios. They certainly are not oracles.
The important bits: “A limited partner's loss from the company's operations may not exceed the amount of the individual's investment.” and “Limited partnerships are pass-through or flow-through entities. That means that all partners are responsible for taxes on their share of the partnership income, rather than the partnership itself.”.
Here's an archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...
Guy was 29 and had some 20+ billion dollars to his name (supposedly). Leave the trading firm to a few folks, keep a bit of equity to enjoy the continued success, and that's it! Just walk away, call it a day and enjoy your life. Same could be said for Zuck - except he had like 25 or 30 billion (not adjusted for inflation) at the same age. I just don't understand it.
NINJA EDIT: changed the amount of money he was apparently worth. Wiki said it got to 28 billion.
The idea of "cashing out" the entirety of your equity in a VC backed co as a founder is not exactly an option unless you're acquired.
Granted, with what we know now, that does fit the definition of securities fraud.
but there’s no cashing out, quitting, and walking away to a beach somewhere after raising billions of dollars…it’s just not an option
Truth is though - if I could ever achieve a payout of a few million or more, I'd call it a day, right on the fucking spot. Invest in long stocks and dividend stocks, and go live in a small home near a cold weather city. I grew up around billionaires, and they scare the shit out of me...no intention of becoming one.
Up to a certain point, more money doesn't make your life materially better.
At that point, the game becomes entirely about power and influence.
The consensus was that if you were the kids, you'd much rather have the post-tax cash in your bank account. :-)
And what is the PV of that board seat at the family controlled charity/business that wasn't affected by an inheritance tax?
It seems incredibly presumptuous to assume you know how the minds of children of billionaires work and what they aspire to have.
This calls to mind a scene in the series "Succession" that I can't find now. The father and owner of the company is considering selling the company and cashing out, and his children, who have all been fighting for years to become his key successor, are up in arms about it, despite the fact that they would all become cash billionaires due to the shares in the company they already own. The gist is that having billions in cash effectively makes you a nobody compared to the person actually running a multi billion dollar company. As the leaders of a global media company, you're somebody important, compared to just some schmuck with a billion dollars. Then again, these characters are all have deep insecurity living in the shadow of their father, and he plays them all like a fiddle to keep them fighting each other for his approval.
> Up to a certain point, more money doesn't make your life materially better.
> It seems incredibly presumptuous to assume you know how the minds of children of billionaires work and what they aspire to have.
Then again, I'm far from a billionaire, so perhaps there exists a valley of money disillusionment that I'm currently in, and more money starts getting desirable again further up the wealth ladder.
Apparently, you misspoke because you're now limiting your view on the value of marginal dollars to your view (v. a general truth above).
Some people will find problems with everything, what a depressing comment. I guess he also runs it as a B-Corp and wrote a book promoting the concept because he wants more power, there's no way he actually wants the employees to have more balanced lives and to put less impact on the planet, it's just a ploy to get more power.
You're the type of person that hears a friend donated money to charity and mutters to themselves that they just did it for attention and recognition.
Because Chouinard is 83 and getting close to his inevitable death, which would have triggered a tax bill for his heirs on the order of $700 million. Because the family likely doesn't have $700 million in cash to pay that tax bill, they would almost certainly be forced to sell off a large portion of their equity in the company, thus losing control to outsiders who many not be fully aligned with the family's interests.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-15/patagonia...
The scheme he just executed allows them to pay only $30 million in tax, and the family will be able to keep control for generations to come without ever triggering an estate tax as each member dies.
By the way, it's not just Chouinard. The Christian founder of Hobby Lobby just pulled the exact same move but "donating his company to God". https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2022/10/27/hob...
It's a marketing, tax avoidance, and power consolidation play. Nothing more.
If this was some oil company pumping out dividends or whatever I'd understand, but your problem is with Patagonia of all things?
Not to mention that the reason the family is receiving said tax break is because the firm's income will no longer flow through them. Giving up the future profits of the firm in perpetuity is surely more expensive than paying a one-time tax bill.
It is symptomatic of our society that people find it impossible to believe that there is even one wealthy man on the planet whose goals and actions aren't entirely self-centered.
Western civilization at least is currently of the opinion that heritable political power is net bad, even if there are plenty of examples of it being good. I suspect the primary reason for this is that competence, context, and experience aren't easy to pass on to your children, and most of the things that make an individual worthy of wielding tremendous power get lost and corrupted after only 2-3 generations.
Most of us can agree now that Chouinard is probably doing net good for Earth's biosphere. Why do you think that will continue to be the case when his grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in charge? Even if they still have the same surface level values, how do you know that they won't be so under educated and incompetent that they won't make counter productive and even destructive decisions with the unearned power they have?
I have zero problem with competent and successful individuals who become absurdly wealthy and powerful.
I have many problems with these individuals then attempting to pass on their extreme wealth and power to their offspring who almost certainly aren't strong enough to wield it.
You raise excellent points about perpetuating lineages and yet your proposal would immediately put a large portion of patagonia in the hands of the very people you propose to want to keep power away from.
If we get another nike or adidas in 2 generations instead of as soon as the guy dies, that's still a way better outcome.
Donate nothing? You're selfish. Donated money? You didn't donate enough. Donate a lot of money? As you say, people will say it was just for the attention.
The trust is there to oversee the company (as its major shareholder) and to make sure that it is held accountable. They in in turn fund the charity and hold them accountable as well.
If Zuck had taken Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook for $1B, neither you nor I would be talking about Facebook or Zuck at all right now.
The only people that get to these insane levels of wealth are people who repeatedly let their bets ride, perhaps due to innately low risk aversion.
About 314 people to be precise.
And then they will go on CNBC and talk about the journey that got them to where they are today.
I think that's kind of the point – I can't imagine myself being offered the choice of "enough money to do whatever you want forever" or "enough money to do whatever you want forever but also constant public attention" and choosing the latter.
The US government will never allow Zuck to sell LifeLog
https://twitter.com/sammykoppelman/status/159047684524111462...
If anything, this study would predict greater risk aversion: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29846850/#:~:text=This%20stu....
Not to mention, money makes your influence increase, and the idea you can start influencing things like politics on a national scale becomes very enticing.
Because you dont know where the "top" is. One could argue the top was 1M. 5M. 100M. 1B.
But my point is that when you're seeing hypergrowth in your company, you probably have an idea of what it's worth or what level you're happy walking away at. Example: I currently run a small side-hustle culinary business while I look for a full-time tech gig. It doesn't make me much money but I enjoy doing it and it helps put food on the table. If someone came up and offered me a million dollars to walk away, I'd take it without blinking.
If Yahoo offered Zuck 10 billion way back when instead of 1 billion, I have a feeling he would have walked away, too.
I don't have billions of dollars, but if I was put in that position, I could imagine myself doing the same, maybe. (not the fraud part, but continue working)
Presumably, they're already doing the thing they enjoy most in life. Cashing out and lying around on a beach or whatever would be extremely disappointing.
Keep in mind there is a survivorship bias at work.
So the really rich guys, they usually do have considerable skill and ability. But they also have taken big risk after big risk and it has, more or less, always paid off for them.
It is all they know...the coin flips going their way. So they are some combo of they are pre-wired to take big risks and/or have been conditioned by experience that the risks just always pay off for them.
So they will just keep taking big risks time after time. There is no "take the money off the table".
The question I always have is it more (A) pre-wired or (B) Good luck has conditioned them over and over. Don't know.
As you point out, you see not just SBF doing this, but Zuck and Elon and the list goes on...
The money is less important (multiple bankruptee becomes prez, Gates used IBM connections, Elizabeth Holmes got investors through family connections, yada yada yada).
There are lots of billionaires that started from upper-middle-class wealth. And other examples of children given huge money that blow it all.
Key word.
But not it looks like most of that wealth was fictional-- just marking up highly illiquid premined shitcoins.
In recent days there’s been evidence that a big portion of SBF’s net worth was tied up in coins SBF issued. To the extent that his companies possessed other assets, many of them were purchased with loans collateralized by SBF coins.
We just saw what happened when confidence in FTX was threatened. The whole thing came tumbling down. Selling out would likely have had the same outcome.
https://mobile.twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/133725070407583334...
https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1299553547596431360
These are excellent topics for classroom discussion. What I believe should have followed is a stronger justification for using something like the Kelly criterion despite a personal near-linear utility function, on the basis that e.g. not going all the way down to zero asymmetrically preserves access to future investment opportunities, and similar grounds. I think plenty of people intuitively understand this.
But instead, nobody was able to explain to him why he couldn’t throw out the book on risk management, and he acted accordingly.
1) it's way too conservative for many people
2) it contains strong assumptions about infinitely repeated identical bets that you can't have an adaptive strategy with, none of which describe the real world
3) it's scale-invariant in a way that is inconsistent with its sublinearity
https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlig... says:
Here, SBF realized, was the rub: When he applied this principle to his own life, he came up short. There was little chance he’d get himself fired from Jane Street. Thus the decision to stick with Jane was a risk-averse preference. It was the logical equivalent of being offered a choice between $50 and 50 percent of $100, and saying, “Give me President Grant.” SBF was risk-neutral on behalf of Jane Street, but not, he realized, for his own life. To be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor, he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk-neutral career path—which, if we strip away the trader-jargon, actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math couldn’t be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth trumps low risk multiplied by mere rich-guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.
Asides on Effective Altruism investing: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9pktesiW2WPEFNvCQ/... https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CsSdjZF7wyNuMvSdy/...
I am criticizing people, possibly including myself, who should have developed more realistic and convincing models clarifying why his behavior was increasingly suboptimal despite his near-linear personal utility function.
His behavior doesn’t really look like self-deception to me. It looks like blindness to poorly articulated limitations of a mathematical model he was taught and understands very well, and I suspect he wouldn’t have been so blind without the “poorly” above.
And, should the system later implode, he could have easily disassociated himself from this fiasco: "those things would not have happened if I were still running things; I lost a lot of billions; I am a victim of this fiasco, just like you are."
In politics, too, very few leaders manage to leave at the right time: while they are near the peak of success, which looks so much better later on...
If it was me, I would cash out and then do some combination of foundation/volunteering work, education, relaxing, and focusing on some of my actual passions.
The most based thing to do would be leaving company, cashing out and building a better alternative.
But nobody that crazy except few guys like Nodejs, Whatsup guys(if not mistaken), lately Jack. But sometimes it's forced by circumstances like founder(s) of vk & Telegram. And you have these serial pump and leave schemes builders as the guy who built Bitshares, Steen, EOS. It maybe shows that only keeping distance to own creation you keep ability to see it critically, notice flaws & point where you can't improve it without fundamentally redesigning it from scratch. People are servants of their goal, if they can't imagine better extension or replacement of the goal they get stuck because only alternative is not having a good goal & being lost. People are scared if being lost more that of death. Maybe both cases are somehow similar.
> Still, I’ve got my answer. And it turns out that I’ve aimed too low. A trillion isn’t enough money to fix the world’s problems, so SBF won’t stop at merely a trillion. It’s an answer that begs the next question, which SBF, ever helpful, has already anticipated: “So, is five trillion all you could ever use to help the world?”
> SBF is now interviewing himself. He slows down for a moment, and I assume that’s because of the cognitive load of doing three things at once. He’s asking good questions (my job); he’s formulating answers (his job); and he’s playing Storybook Brawl (no one’s job). But then I hear the tap-tap-tapping from his fingers start to accelerate, and I realize he’s not slowing down under the load at all. Just the opposite, in fact: This guy is in the Storybook Brawl equivalent of a gank!
This entire profile is incredible. SBF is one of the greatest conmen of all time, the absolute gall to testify in Congress, pal around with celebs, buy the naming rights to the Miami Heat stadium, claim he is "the most transparent", all built on a total scam of stealing billions.
If this guy doesn't go to jail why do we even have jails?