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Comment by tssva | Hacker News Reader

The thing I'm most confused about in this comment is that you ever believed that VC's and startups were some kind of noble class.

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I believed that VCs and startups were mostly good people trying to do the right thing.

But what we've seen in the last few days is utterly despicable behaviour by many of the leading figures driven solely by greed and self-interest.

I think increasingly startups will look to bootstrap in the coming years.

> I believed that VCs and startups were mostly good people trying to do the right thing.

I have not seen one human being that didn't turn around because of greed.

We are all vulnerable

These aren't children. They are grown adults many in the later years of their life.

Nobody is changing their stripes.

I imagine you are not looking too hard. I have met many people who have dedicated their life to service and not greed. Richard Stillman is one if you need an example.

It takes a hobbit.

Most people are driven by greed and self interest. Especially VC and Startups, otherwise why did they join the business?

Literally the whole point of a startup is to make a lot of money?

Absolutely - because otherwise the risk to take them on is too high in all measurable terms (time, lost time, lost opportunity, lost capital, emotional toil)

Unfortunately the finance industry has perverted the purpose of startups and companies as a whole. While it is the way currently, it wasn’t until the past 15 years or so. It used to be you solved a problem or met a need. You made money because of this. It makes me sick that companies’ sole purpose now is to enrich shareholders.

Not for many of us. I work in medtech, medical devices specifically. For me it's about bringing new medical treatments to market and therefore to be able to help people with those new devices. Large intrenched medical device manufacturers cannot innovate, they don't know how, so the only way to really innovate AMF bring new medical devices to market is through thr startup pathway.

What is the “utterly despicable behaviour”? Startups trying to protect their investor’s assets? Banks trying to secure low risk long-term returns? Clearly they should have hedged, but is this really a moral failure?

I think of people like David Sacks preaching libertarianism and not taking money from the government until the moment things seemed uncertain at which point he’s practically begging for government bail out.

I think given his influence and hypocrisy this is despicable. But pathetic is another word that comes to mind.

I think people are unhappy about the hypocrisy in the form of a special carve out. This class of people, despite their wealth and influence, aren't exactly lobbying for expansion of similar protections for the average person. In fact, who's to say if a lot of these startups weren't just laying off people as part of the crowd recently? So people are mad of the unfairness.

How is it a special carve out? The FDIC protects literally all the other deposits already.

They quite literally made exceptions for SVB and Signature only.

And all the average persons the OP mentioned were already protected. We’ll see if this stops the contagion. It’s in our collective interest that it does.

Yes, it's a moral failure. Fiduciary duty is often poorly-remunerated and boring. If you can't tolerate that, don't become a fiduciary.

The "changing the world" talk is just as hollow as corporate business talk. Just a way to talk about what you're doing without specifically mentioning that "we're doing this to get more money", which is the actual reason anyone ever does anything.

Some founders/investors believe their own BS because that's what a good salesman does.

Being practical and sugar coating words has been the way to do business forever. The startup speak is just a specific flavor of words that's popular in a region/culture now, is representative of the business culture to some degree, but is just as hollow as any pleasantry.

> Just a way to talk about what you're doing without specifically mentioning that "we're doing this to get more money", which is the actual reason anyone ever does anything.

blanket statement, also bullshit. Of course money is a driver, but if that's your only driver as an entrepreneur then you're likely not going to be very successful. In fact, this is the primary difference between VCs and builders.

Fine, humans are multifaceted creatures and some business owners do actually care about making a change in their market in a positive way. The moment you choose to start a private for-profit business however, you're still forced to optimize your business decisions to favor your own economic growth -- that will end up being the major driving factor behind most decisions. Few people let ideology come between them and large sums of cash.

  > The "changing the world" talk is just as hollow as corporate business talk.

The changing the world talk is just corporate business talk.

Why bootstrap? The VCs came through for their companies here. They got the government to change course. Many told their startups ahead of time to pull cash from a failing bank.

> Many told their startups ahead of time to pull cash from a failing bank.

Still pissed about that. It was the proximate cause of the bank run.

Most good people trying to do the right thing eventually reach the conclusion that they should leave the tech/startup scene altogether. There are so many problems in the tech world that we only overlook them because we have a stake in it.

> I believed that VCs and startups were mostly good people trying to do the right thing.

I'm sure a lot of mortgage originators in 2006 thought they were doing the right thing by getting risky people into houses before prices rocketed into the stratosphere, because, you know, home values never go down.

VCs have always been money managers looking to make a big return on their existing capital. No part of that has ever included being a good person or trying to do the right thing.

It's convenient for tech companies that VC investment strategy involves giving seed money to some startups, but it comes at a price of the VCs having some say over company decisions and a high percentage of ownership (and therefore eventual value).

Not the OP and I hadn't put them in the noble class category, but until a few years ago I had truly believed that the innovation that was still coming out of the US (and out of the West more generally) was in no small part thanks to SV startups (and hence thanks to the VC industry supporting them).

The whole crypto fiasco plus a few other things (these SV people going from worshipping Musk to hating him in a very short period, for example) have convinced me that I was a holding a view that was not based on anything of substance.

Which begs the question: where does real innovation come from in the US (and the West more generally)? The SV start-ups are not providing it, ditto for the FAANGs, what's left?

> where does real innovation come from in the US (and the West more generally)?

Chinese-style surveillance tech, unironically. The next great experiment after social media is the increasing use of tech to control people with an personalized granularity that free-market capitalism (or even MMT) could never dream to achieve.

In other words, the plot of MGS2.

For obvious reasons all this is unpopular here. But regardless of feelings, it is the next logical step.

> Chinese-style surveillance tech, unironically

Yeah, now that you mention it the one thing at which AI is really good at is image recognition.

There was this drone video [1] of a busy intersection posted on my country's sub-reddit recently, and from second 0:11 or so the way that the software is able to "recognise" and assign an unique ID to each and every car from that intersection is very Minority Report-y. What's scarier is that this looks like consumer-level stuff, not some fancy state-run surveillance thingie.

I assume the drone is Chinese-made, most probably also the software that made that identification possible.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Romania/comments/11p9o7w/intersec%C...

Most people that I have come across who are not experienced in tech startups seem to have some kind of holy image of VCs. They seem to think they're all "rich and successful". They think it is some kind of highly esteemed job to possess. Contrastingly, people who have been in the startup game for years know that VCs are just salespeople, and a great majority of them lose other peoples' money while just raking in a normal salary.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with the government protecting people when they lose everything due to circumstances beyond their control. I’m glad to see VCs finally fighting for their progressive ideals.

That's how VCs and certain founders have been portrayed by mass media and even on HN for many years.

And people don't question these portrayals? That's the surprising part.

A lot of being repeatedly told to take the most charitable interpretation of peoples words and action. Hoping that folks are more than their animal instincts.

Naive, eh?

When's the last time you saw a critical appraisal of any senior YC people on this forum? For a long time, Wilson, Andreesen and other marquee names in the VC world were treated with similar deference on HN.

Fawning media startup profiles and hagiographies are one of the reasons why Theranos, WeWork, and many smaller companies are able to thrive and even attract new investment and customers.

> When's the last time you saw a critical appraisal of any senior YC people on this forum?

There was a post a couple of months ago asking what's the secret behind Sam Altman's excellent aptitude when it comes to grifting. Those weren't the exact words, but that was the general attitude of the post. But that post was part of the few exceptions that confirm the rule.

Found the post [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34471720

To be fair, we're on a forum that was originally called "Startup News," created by a billionaire venture capitalist and run by a startup incubator. People do question the SV narrative, but this is still the lobby where all the people who drink the Kool-Aid hang out.

When maia arson crimew's site got linked here, she put a notice on top of her airline database hacking article with some disparaging commentaries about HN. Sure it may be a bit harsh for some people but she has got a point. This place is not immune to groupthink but in fact may actually be worse than forums with more diverse topics.

I think anyone who watched Silicon Valley has a more nuanced view of the VC industry than is being asserted here. And U.S. media coverage of tech in recent years has been overwhelmingly negative.

That being said HN is one of the last great (mostly-)unmoderated forums on the internet. I personally think U.S. media has been almost unfairly negative about the whole thing.

I cannot decide if the idea that VCs are some kind of kindhearted patrons and startups in general are all moral straight arrows dedicated to only good things is outright propaganda or just distilled Silicon Valley delusion. Hanlon's Razor indicates the latter, but I do wonder.

For every one company that genuinely is working out of the goodness of their hearts, there are 10 serial founders seeking to inveigle their way into something as a middleman, sorry "disruptor", then cash out and go round again before anyone notices the cracks.

> For every one company that genuinely is working out of the goodness of their hearts, there are 10 serial founders seeking to inveigle their way into something as a middleman, sorry "disruptor", then cash out and go round again before anyone notices the cracks.

Well said.

I used to believe it until about 7 years ago, when I started to build an open source alternative to the rentseeking Big Tech industry. Too much of Web2 and Web3 was based around the profit motive, and no one stuck around long enough to replicate their stack and give it to the people:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

https://github.com/Intercoin

I believe in gift economies (science, wikipedia, open source) being superior to capitalism and private ownership of platforms.

Instead of Zuck, Elon and Bezos we could use more Linus, TimBernereLee and Vitalik.

Not for nothing but literally every person you cited, good and bad, came from well off families who built that wealth via capitalism. We'd be better off fixing the wealth disparity and making it so there are more people with a safety net that allows them to engage in gift economies like the open source software world.

It is difficult to be charitable when you have to worry where your next meal comes from.

You're right. That's why I believe in UBI and Universal Health Insurance as well. I speak about this quite a bit, and build it too:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/new-ubi-movement-mayors-ci...

https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees

A lot of people employed by tech companies are paid by their companies to contribute to open source projects which the company uses, so the gift economy is still deeply tied with capitalism despite the appearance.

I think as long as they don‘t get entrenched (usually by regulatory moats that prevent disruption) these go hand in hand. Creating a novel product/service and generating product market fit is kind if like science. Even if they get rich from it, now the whole world knows forever that this is a particular way to create value. As long as it is not driven by subsidies or caters other government linked industries that could skew/bias the value signal the demonstration as well as the offering of these goods and services is a net good imo

Agreed. This is what shocked me most. I have always thought VC = Vulture Capitalist.

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