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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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).

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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