Silicon Valley's Hottest VC Is a Rug Dealer | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley's Hottest VC Is a Rug Dealer

forbes.com

57 pointsesalazar18 comments

I had no idea the carpet stores in downtown Palo Alto ever sold actual carpets; I've never seen anyone in any of them. I guess when you sell a product which appreciates with time (like wine) and where each item is both high margin and high price, they don't need a lot of traffic -- plus the "showing at your home" thing.

(I picked up a bunch of nice Qom and Afghani carpets when I was in Afghanistan. Kind of amazing to get 80-100 year old wool carpets in such good condition. I'm more in the $100-500 range vs. the $5-20k US retail price range. The thing I really want is an Afghan fortress door turned into a conference table -- one of the stores in downtown Kabul has a branch in Los Angeles run by the guy's brother, so it didn't seem worth trying to arrange shipment myself.)

There is an absurd number of them. It used to feel like a quarter of al the stores on University were selling rugs.

I just assume that stores I can't explain are fronts for something.

I used to work in Times Square and always wondered about the absurdly expensive gadget stores around...

A few years ago I was in Montreal and commented on the presence of what seemed like an extraordinarily large number of stores selling Persian rugs. I was told -- completely sincerely, as far as I could tell -- that they were fronts for drug smuggling, since the rugs were bulky enough to hide things in and expensive enough that customs agents wouldn't start slicing them open on the basis of drug dogs alone.

I'm still not sure if there was any truth to that story or if it was just xenophobia speaking.

Pioneer Square in Seattle is also littered with an irrational number of carpet stores. It seems like a widespread oddity, whatever the cause.

That article makes me feel like there is a parallel Silicon Valley that I haven't seen into. I don't think I am a coinvestor on a single deal with them.

There are many different groups in Silicon Valley with varying levels of overlaps.

Like some kind of Bizarro Valley where shady rug deals finance hot new tech startups? I'd watch that movie.

At first glance I thought the headline said,

"Silicon Valley's Hottest VC Is a Drug Dealer"

Would have made for a nice twist.

I actually called his office last week trying to speak with him. Some of the best venture capitalists took my calls to give some great suggestions and feedback. One was an original investor in WebMD and another was a very big in the venture world. I even had a discussion with Alan Patricof's office since Alan's son and I were friends since childhood. I used to hang out at their house before Bill Clinton did. I also lived across from another rug dealer who did pretty well. His name was Tom Freston and for those of you who are kind of young, he was the main guy at MTV a long time ago. I set a meeting with MTV just by calling him up and persisting. You never know what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it. It doesn't matter if your a rug dealer, have a PHD, or were homeless. My motto is to keep going and to never stop no matter what!

Funny that Plug and Play Tech Center was not mentioned. That's the setting where Saeed Amidi made those investments and gave real estate to those early companies mentioned. This was around pre-YC but never quite adapted to what entrepreneurs really needed: rock solid mentorship as opposed to just real estate.

Did it close? The building it was in seems to have removed the marquis.

It is still there...http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/startups/office-space

I was at Planet Granite next door to there yesterday and there is definitely still a sign up.

Did Nozad and the Amidis make more money from the carpet business or from Plug and Play? Even if not, it's a pretty big thing to be left out.

My wife thought for the longest time that this store was a front for something. I had heard of a persian landlord in the area taking equity in lieu of rent for office space leased to startups but first time I'm reading of the back story of the rug store. Move over Ron Conway :)

Pretty darn interesting view in this article. "Hustle" is the magic factor, is what I got from it. Keep trying and asking for things (intelligently), and you'll eventually get some of them.

“There are too many of them investing in too many deals,” snickers one prominent venture capitalist. “This doesn’t end well for a lot of white-haired guys who should know better.”

something about that guy reminds me of lazarus long from the heinlein novels. toss him into a brand new environment, and he can look around, take its pulse, find out almost instinctively where the leverage points are, and land on his feet.

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