Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex–and Maybe You Should Too (2022)

The power of a book is how long you sit down thinking about the topics as much as the words on it. Anything that reduces the reading time will also reduce the thinking time which reduces the value.

Sure many modern books could've been shorter, specially the kind of pop-sci books most people read, but still I never heard this argument made by someone who's read any sensible number of books in their life. And if you're under, say 50-100 books, you haven't read enough for me to believe you understand how other people think.

I guess that's what he's talking about, even if there are a lot of books where the length is more than justified.

But that isn't most of the books I've read.

To me, that quote just smacks of "I'm VERY SMART and have little to learn from others. Please summarize your ideas concisely so I may efficiently judge them."

I feel like most people who have ever had that mental model of reading evolve past that type of thinking and settle into the "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" mode of thinking by the time they reach high school (yours truly included). Not to mention one often needs to take a moment for newly acquired information to "settle", and language that's (loosely) bridgework between facts is what grants that moment.

"I am very skeptical of depth. I don't want to say that nothing is complex enough to require time to explain or understand... but I've never taken the time to really understand anything and look how rich I am. The fact that I'm so rich proves that there is nothing below the surface, and anyone doing real work or research is just wasting their time and deluding themselves."

There’s a biggish department of game devs that takes up almost the same amount of vertical space as the actual dev team of FTX. It’s the game studio behind Storybook Brawl. SBF purchased the studio because he liked the game, and it was rolled into FTX.

Yeah, that's not actually helping anyone.

Both the Sequioa response to this pitch. And basically the same pitch/goal that Elon raised money on for the Twitter/X deal - and what he's trying to build.

I'm very curious to see if Apple/Meta rotate out of an attempt to have separate apps for different functions (e.g. Messenger separate from Facebook, or Apple Pay separate from iMessage) and rotate back toward building an integrated "SuperApp."

Certainly the "WeChat of the US" would be infinitely valuable.

If you go in to a VC and tell them that you can likely do a $50m trade sale in 3 years time, you're telling them you're a waste of time, because odds are still that you will fail before that, and you're not betting on a big enough outcome that if you're successful their return will offset enough of the failures.

When I worked for a VC, if you weren't pitching 100m+ revenue within 5-10 years, it was a near instant no. Not because we believed you'd achieve that, because most likely you wouldn't just fail to achieve that but you'd be bankrupt before then. But because if you're not even setting your sights high enough, you're not even in the game, and we needed founders to set their sights high enough that the few companies who survive has a shot at high enough exits.

But most founders who pitch do not understand that. Their pitch decks are defensive, and full of worst case estimates. The VC's worst case is that you'll be bankrupt; the proportion of companies who survive and live on as "zombies" that eventually produce a low trade sale produce returns way too low to offset the bankruptcies - founders that aim that low are wasted opportunities for VCs.

That goes a long way to explain why they'd be excited about someone who is selling an idea of some crazy expansive plan: Whether or not they though it realistic, they were seeing someone unusual enough to dare voice a crazy level of ambition. He only really needed to convince them he'd try, and make them think that the potential returns outweighed whatever increased risk they saw.

After the umpteenth founder telling you how they're minimising risk and showing your forecasts of a worst case scenario that are irrelevant to the VC fund, I can see that being exciting.

I've lost count of the number of founders we had to explain to that while their defensive plans probably increased their chance of their company surviving, if you go for VC investment, being conservative and defensive is not going to convince anyone, or they'd be retail bankers instead. You're effectively pitching a guaranteed loss rather than a likely loss but a chance at a big prize. Even a totally crazy pitch where it looks like they're some chance at a big prize is going to be more exciting than a pitch where the founder is telling you how best case he'll still not earn you enough.

Of course the problem with this is that it also plays straight into the hands of delusional or crooked people willing to just make shit up to try to sell an idea they have no idea how to make work, and punishes a lot of otherwise brilliant founders who just don't understand what is expected by a VC.

The idea is that some of us are so superior, morality doesn't apply to them. They can see the "greater good", so it's okay to stamp on "common" morality. I'm guessing SBF never got around to dostoyevsky at MIT.