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Comment by weatherlite | Hacker News Reader

It is irrational. I don't like Neumann at all but if you work in tech, these VCs crashing can't really be good for our jobs and salaries.

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It's inevitable, though. Eventually the butcher's bill comes due; irrational valuations based on user growth or revenue alone always had a fuse attached to them, because they required a greater fool to come along and pick up the tab. Now that the tech market is having to mature and focus on profitability in general, VCs who only paid attention to the next big hype wave are going to get wiped out. Arguably, it would have been healthier if this had happened five years ago -- delaying the pain only increases it.

Not always. People thought Facebook had an insane seed valuation. Google was “very expensive” upon IPO.

Going to be contrarian and argue its perfectly rational to be angry about Neumann getting $350 Million.

Objectively, Adam Neumann does not have the track record to support that kind of investment. He does not have a track record of building sustainable enterprises. In fact, there's not even evidence he's more capable than the median technology entrepreneur. a16z could probably generate equivalent returns throwing $10million at the next 35 entrepreneurs who pitch them.

It would only be irrational if Neumann had a track record of actually building sustainable businesses. But he couldn't even do it in a 0% interest rate environment!

If your wealth and well-being is tied to the puppy crushing machine continuing to crush puppies, maybe it's time to reflect on that and reconsider the systems we take for granted.

Let's not pretend there wouldn't be massive industry around puppy-crushing machines if it was profitable for corporations, and marginally legal.

Decades of industry centered around killing other baby animals have shown this.

If anything, it's likely that the lack of a profit motive for "puppy-crushing" has shaped society's general distaste for "companion animal" abuse, while accepting other types of animal abuse as just a way of life.

There is a massive industry around puppy-crushing machines. We call them "puppy mills" and they're large commercial operations that overbreed puppies for sale and kill the undesirables.

I wouldn't say my well-being but we all make a living in this industry, it's what pays the bills. Guess you don't care about that?

This industry involves plenty more than VCs, particularly these VCs.

There are plenty of bits of the tech industry that aren't powered by hype and free money.

That's why I said reflect on the system, not just your own actions within it. You can try to switch careers from a job that actively crushes puppies to one that merely maintains the puppy crushing machine, but the problem is the puppy crushing itself and if the only way to pay your bills is to contribute to that, that's a systemic problem, not one of personal responsibility.

> If your wealth and well-being is tied to the puppy crushing machine

Let's crush some puppies m'boy.

Them bills, they keep coming.

There are puppy crushing machines everywhere. E.g. physicians in the US are paid high premiums relative to other OPEC countries not because their quality of care of experience is significantly higher, but because of the insurance model we have here [1]. Capitalism works for everyone only with strong guardrails which have instead been eroding for decades.

[1] https://nypost.com/2023/02/19/doctor-insurance-companies-wan...

Also because of massive student-debt loads - the average GP came out with like $250k even a few years ago. Someone's gotta pay that, and ultimately it's the patients.

The US medical system is so fucked it's almost hard to narrow it down to specific reasons: essentially it's at the nexus of the symptoms of virtually every crisis-of-capitalism that the US has allowed to fester over the last 70 years. Patents, education, insurance/financialization, employer-labor relations, federalism-induced complexity from state-level rulemaking (and racing to the bottom when that doesn't happen), racial bias to outcomes... I'm sure there's tons that I'm forgetting offhand.

Basically name a high-level problem/trend in american society and you can almost 100% certainly come up with a reasonable thesis for how that problem is making the american medical system worse.

similarly, name a group of powerful stakeholders and you can be sure that reform of the system will probably impact them negatively on a personal/financial level. Seniors? Investors? Doctors? Universities? etc etc.

to me it is without a doubt the single most politically-complex and personally-charged issue in the entire US system and that's really saying something.

> Also because of massive student-debt loads - the average GP came out with like $250k even a few years ago. Someone's gotta pay that, and ultimately it's the patients.

I doubt that's the reason for high doctor wages. They will keep making a huge buck even if tuition is cut by 80% imo. The reason I'm saying this is that the market doesn't care how much debt you have from school: you can pay Harvard 240K to get an art degree, that's not going to make anyone pay you what doctors are earning. You can become unemployed with big debt as you graduate.

Yes. Hence what I said.

I think it's irrational, but definitely not for the reason you post. If VCs are using funny money to invest in bullshit technology that deserves to die, I'm fine with our jobs and salaries taking a reset back to a reasonable proportion of actual value created. More of us will be working on actual useful stuff again.

This is the right answer.

I think the startup scene is mostly a huge grift. Companies that don't make any sense being propped up by VC money until they find and exit (typically an IPO) and are left to crash and burn. I avoid working for startups like I avoid the plague.

But I like that the grift exists. They inject money into the industry, being indirectly responsible for my salary being much higher than I ever expected.

I hope the startup grift and the advertisement fueled maelstrom keeps going until it's time for me to retire, god bless them.

>these VCs crashing can't really be good for our jobs and salaries

This stayed in my head for a day. I finally have a response.

If you're salary is dependent on turning $1.00 into $0.20 as in the case for Adam Neumann and his ilk and those who fund them, then eventually your salary and skill and job is going to crash because it "will run out of other people's money". If your trade is taking in 1 dollar from a VC to acquire 20 cents of customer revenue, your trade is going to end. All the myth making and loose monetary policy in the world will merely delay that end.

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