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Comment by three_seagrass | Hacker News Reader

That's at least one strong reason - VCs look at the person as much as the business.

Crypto was filled with sleazy car-salesman "investor" types at the time Alameda Research was looking for funding. So when in came someone with a Jane Street background and not a single flashy Ferrari in their driveway, the dam broke on VCs finally being able to pour money into the crypto space on a decent looking founder.

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If that's how unsophisticated these VC operations are then I think we'll see a lot of them lose their shirts in the coming macroeconomic environment. Which will consequently make future funding rounds all the more difficult.

Unless the Fed blinks.

The closer to an election, the more likely the case

Just today the Fed governors stated inflation has not been sufficiently curtailed... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/17/feds-bullard-says-rate-hikes...

Sure, I'm just curious how we'll deal with interest payments on our debt, especially since our economy has evolved to thrive on low rates. The hikes are necessary, but I think they're going to kill a bunch of BS jobs, meanwhile we'll have to raise taxes to service the debt. Gonna be real interesting.

Nation debt isn't like a personal checkbook. As long as the economy grows just as fast or faster than the debt over time, then they're okay.

Sure, but we made the economy grow by keeping debt cheap. Now debt will be expensive and all signs point to the economy not growing in such an environment.

VCs only need to roll a crit hit on a 1d20 to stay afloat.

They're not going to lose their shirts, not as long as insanely wealthy people like to gamble.

I am slightly baffled by this comment since my first impression of him was exactly "sleazy vibes". Not in the flashy Ferrari sense but because the look seemed to try so hard to be the opposite of flash - the nasty stretched out t-shirts, shorts and forever bed-head hair. It struck me as a contrived and something of a put on. Google "John Blutarsky Animal House." SBF appears to have patterned his look after Jon Belushi's character in that movie. I think you have to make an effort to look like that so consistently, especially when there are cameras around.

I can confirm that this kind of look is not at all atypical in the quantitative prop trading world and it's not contrived.

Well if it's so common as to be a kind of uniform isn't that the very definition of contrived? How else would you explain the phenomenon then, that slobs just naturally gravitate towards prop trading?

Plus both his parents are professors at Stanford Law school. I can see VCs having a natural bias towards "it would be unlikely for someone with this pedigree to operate so completely outside the law".

Unless - hypothetically - some of them were looking for someone who would operate outside the law, but with pedigree and credibility.

There was a lot of money involved. There was a huge network of shell companies to hide it.

VCs, who are supposed to know what due diligence is, looked at some hilariously unprofessional books and said "We like the look of this."

Is it unreasonable to wonder what was going on?

SBF had huge sleaze vibes, so I don't know if your logic applies.

> and not a single flashy Ferrari

the article mentions his $30 million dollar penthouse ... It seems the only place the flashy assets didn't exist was in the press coverage put out by organizations SBF gave money to...

Nice real estate and art send a very different signal than an exotic car, even if they're kind of high-life blingy.

>the article mentions his $30 million dollar penthouse

the $30M penthouse in the Bahamas that was purchased using investor money and customer funds... he didn't own it at the time he received funding from these big name VCs, did he?

SBF branding himself as an effective altruist and even purposely dressed in the silicon valley "genius" attire. His condo in the bahamas was after he hit it big and needed to be close to Washington to work on crypto regulation.

There's a huge gap between that and the majority of crypto founders at the time.

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