You Are Not the Man in the Arena | Hacker News Reader

You Are Not the Man in the Arena

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58 pointsnickwritesit27 comments

Very well said. It omits another point, though, which is that SV's cultural failure to reject con artists and abusive methods is what has led directly to the very dim view the general public increasingly has toward the industry. And that dim view is well-earned.

We as an industry really need to right this ship.

SV does reject con artists, it's just that con artists love to fake associate themselves with SV and then people who don't know any better believe that the con artists are real because of that fake association.

(If you define 'SV' to mean only the major companies, VC firms, and big decision makers actually HQed in SV.)

This isn't a solvable problem, while still remaining a somewhat free country, since roughly half the population will always be below average in sniffing out dupes. So some fraction of con artists will always be able to succeed in duping some folks.

Of course there are a lot of SV entry level and middle management types that go bad since even a 2% corruption rate means thousands of people per annum at SV scale.

> SV does reject con artists

The incredible amount of money Andreesen Horowitz poured into so many different crypto scams contradicts this. Not to mention the incredible amount of terrible companies which had business plans that were prima facie ridiculous.

Did you really expect a 100% perfect rate? i.e. infallibility?

No real system can accomplish that, even 99.9% is already a very high bar.

A16Z has a portfolio size of $35 billion and invested nearly $8 billion in pure cryptocurrency schemes (probably quite a bit more additional investment through some of their funds which aren't exclusively crypto plays). We're not talking "99.9% avoidance of obvious scams" or any other tiny fraction.

Their flagship crypto fund was down 40% in 2022. Even if it returned profits to shareholders since its seed investments in 2009, it did so at the expense of people who bought in later, like all crypto wins. They didn't "create value" they, at best, extracted value from crypto scams. And at this point it's not even clear to me how the fund is performing overall.

Yes but we're talking about SV as a whole, not a specific firm? If we assume a quarter of a16z's crypto investments will turn out to be actual frauds, which is a big assumption, that's only a small bit of all the money flowing through SV.

And plus I think even a 98% success rate of avoiding scams is already pretty noteworthy, like I said 99.9% is a very high bar.

Where did you get 98% from?

It's my personal bar for someone/some group to be considered honest. I'm not sure what 'reaperman's threshold is but I doubt it's literally 100% or even 99.9%.

So you’re asserting that it’s your belief that less than 2% of Silicon Valley VC money is invested in scams or invested to perpetuate a scam?

Besides A16Z, what are the other investment firms that you feel comprises the core of Silicon Valley VC culture?

No not really? Why would I be asserting that to you or anyone else?

Obviously I don't have access to the detailed financial records of every major player in SV, nor likely does anyone else on HN.

The “major players” post the vast majority of their investments because they’re advertising their funds to potential limited partners. It also publicly signaling the strength of the companies they invest in which improves their outcomes through ease of negotiating future business agreements with potential customers and partners.

So it’s definitely possible to establish an approximate upper and lower bound, and it’s way above your 2% limit.

You’d either have to accept that SV does, in fact, deal heavily in scams, or post-facto adjust your tolerance limit to set the bar lower.

What are you talking about? If you somehow know better then link or reference the sources.

Again: which VC’s do you consider the core of Silicon Valley business culture?

I did A16Z already. This only involves a very easy google search, and maybe throw in some crunchbase searches. It’s an absolutely trivial task and I’d expect you to try doing this exercise on at least one other VC that you’re interested in.

I could do an exhaustive analysis of public data, but that would be more of a blog post than a discussion comment. I expect you to put in a minimum amount of effort towards fact-checking if you want people to take your strong opinions seriously.

So if your not going to actually cite enough sources for your claims to be credible, why would anyone take your opinion seriously either?

For the third time: which VC’s do you consider the core of Silicon Valley business culture?

I need you to answer this question so that when I do the analysis I’m not wasting time analyzing investment firms that you don’t think represent Silicon Valley.

I’ll write the blog post for you. But not if you won’t participate in this discussion with a bare minimum of contributing effort. Otherwise it’s purely a one-way discussion, where I do all the work and you just say “no no no”. But I haven’t gotten a single constructive iota from you in this entire discussion. You’ve put in zero effort at all.

It seems your confused 'runnerup', your behaving as if I had initially responded to your comment, when in fact it's the opposite, even more so as you started asking strangely combative questions under a response I made for 'reaperman'.

Usual HN custom is to answer one question after the other user answers one, or two for two, etc., not to ignore them and immediately demand answers to subsequent questions. And I had already answered two without even getting an answer to:

>Why would I be asserting that to you or anyone else?

The major companies aren't "Silicon Valley" to the normal person, though. There was a reason the show "Silicon Valley" was about a startup and not some boring middle manager working for Google or Facebook.

There's obviously too many startups to form a solid impression of percentages but I don't think the rate of fraud in startups is noticeably higher then in any other major city. Some small fraction of startups, businesses, entrepreneurs, etc., will be outright frauds anywhere.

Maybe some viewers believed that literally 100% of the startup population has honest intentions, and then they become disappointed in reality?

I (vehemently) agree with the article's points.

But can we stop referring to this class of delusional oligarchs as "Silicon Valley" or "the tech world," etc? Rank and file engineers, even most of the exceptional and high ranking ones, simply do not share the worldviews of the VCs and Musks and Thiels of the world. Many do, sure (probably over-represented on this site), but nothing like a majority. And I'm tired of being implicitly lumped in with them as part of "the tech world." This is an oligarch problem more than a tech problem.

I hear you. But on the flipside, everyone who works in the industry and isn't pushing to fix the problem is helping to perpetuate the problem (myself included). We are enabling them to operate as they do, after all, regardless of whether or not we share that worldview.

It doesn't really matter at all, frankly. The workplace is not a democracy, it's a dictatorship. Whether you view the workers as nuanced complex moral human beings or just cogs doesn't change the impact the companies have on the world.

> The valley’s valorization of “disruption” — a euphemism for destruction — allows bad people to keep winning.

I've spent most of my life following this religion, but over the last couple of years I've started to think that we maybe can't, as a species, afford to entertain this "disruption" model. We need less disruption, and more resilience. You can make the argument that disruptive startups play "chaos monkey," hardening the economy through adversarial inoculation, but I'm not convinced we're building anything useful—only exploiting local optima with structures that will collapse like California's aquifers as they undermine the economic sustainability of their own milieu.

When insulated elite take on the identity of some ancient philosophy or pragmatic quote, these ideas also tend to spread to the gestalt. Or maybe it's vice versa.

As a younger adult and fresh college dropout I used to cling to stoicism around the time "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius become popular again.

Super embarrassing, but I even had a picture of Elon Musk hanging on my mirror. But, this also helped me ignore some painful aspects about my life and move on.

When I could finally do something about my problems, the idea of stoicism slowly outlived its utility for me. Sure as hell didn't stop me from burning out multiple times afterwards.

I picked up Chekhov years ago and this quote from Ward No. 6 helped me gain some perspective:

"You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece ... Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it's hot there without. You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives. But bring him to Russia to live: he'd be begging to be let indoors in May, let alone December. He'd be doubled up with the cold.

At this point I just believe that most of these high-minded ideas are after-the-fact reasonings about how or why ones life went well or poorly.

From what you wrote, it seems like you were fundamentally misunderstanding Stoicism. Not unusual for a young person just learning about philosophy, but still, and important distinction.

The core idea of Stoicism is identifying what is actually under your power and control, and focusing your energy on that. It is in some sense, virtually the opposite of it's popular perception (e.g. "little s" stoicism) of just accepting things as they are and suffering quietly.

I think the book Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot by Jim Stockdale is a good example of how effective stoicism is in actual "cold weather" so to speak.

> When I could finally do something about my problems, the idea of stoicism slowly outlived its utility for me.

Can you expand on that? Isn't one of the ideas of stoicism to focus on the things you can do to solve your problems?

As far as I can tell most philosophy/thought is really rationalization not reasoning. In the information age the clay at your fingertips to mold the strongest and most effective rationalizations to allow you to get through the day is near infinite. You can pick and choose the exact ideas you need to allow you to accomplish whatever goal or self-image you want.

TL;DR: Some venture capitalists are charlatans. Specifically, while the accumulation of great wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals allows those individuals to embark on great projects, many of the great projects that venture capitalists embark on are actually just swindles.

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