The Little Tech Agenda | Hacker News Reader

The Little Tech Agenda

a16z.com

12 pointstosh16 comments

Whinging about crypto regulation is not the lobbying I was looking for.

Want to help little-tech? Fix healthcare so people can leave their job.

you're just insufficiently cynical.

none of these people have any real interest in "tech" or "helping startups", their actual goal is "increasing the money/power they have". sometimes those three things align, right now they clearly don't and what they actually want is just carte blanche to do fraud and also a huge transfer of cash from US taxpayers to them.

HN en masse has just been supremely gullible for many many many years.

Are there any online communities sufficiently cynical?

good point! maybe the problem is it isn't possible/reasonable for anyone to try to match the cynicism of such people.

I think the tripwire that triggered this is

"Problem: the government is currently proposing a tax on unrealized capital gains, which would absolutely kill both startups and the venture capital industry that funds them."

That would have implications across the entire economy not just those two sectors. Not to mention the fallout effects from those two. I guess the government thinks that too many people are retiring. We need more rats on the wheels to keep this fraud and gambling going.

To be clear, the unrealized tax gains proposals are for those with a net worth over $100m and partnerships, trusts, or non-corporate entities which have not had a taxable event in 90 years.

If this impacts those individual’s retirement plans and puts them back in the rat race, well, that’s on them IMO.

This is many venture capital firms and many high flying startups. This would at best drastically curtail new VC funds and hammer existing ones. It's one thing to price options for stock which is not publicly traded. It's another to impute income.

Reasonable men may differ but I don't think the A16Z "Little Tech agenda" overstates the impact.

Many VC firms and high flying startups are individuals with > $100m in net worth or are non corporate entities with 90+ years without a taxable event?

Many successful VC firms and high flying startups are composed of individuals with a 100m net worth--especially if you impute earnings based on a stock price for equity that is not easily liquid.

Sorry, I misspoke, the actual proposal from Wyden was for individuals worth more than $1b or with >$100m/annual income for more than 3 years in a row. That will hit some VCs, but I don't feel particularly bad about it. It won't hit the startups.

There's about 700 people in the country that would be effected.

I really do hope everyone now views all the nonsense VC folks post in exactly the right light - as whatever they think will benefit them personally.

that was the case when they were telling you to not go to university, or to sign up with one of their random other companies and also now, when the are trying to get US taxpayers to give them jillions of dollars for their fucking stupid fun bucks and to let them keep doing fraud across everyone else.

an organization that is currently small in headcount but is funded by big VCs is not "little" in any sense -- the VC is big business and each startup in their portfolio is essentially just a subsidiary.

Something like SourceHut is Little Tech. STFU a16z. You're not the little guy; quit pretending you are. It's annoying.

Yeah this. I clicked on this hoping it would be about small companies or individuals who make cool, useful tech that might turn a profit but doesn't have the potential or ambition to scale into a unicorn.

We need a movement for that stuff.

The bullshit agenda.

A16Z seems to do a little more 'investor branding' than other firms and this is part of that strategy. I would call this piece more of a backstop to explain their donations to the Trump campaign more than anything else. Their existing portfolio contains companies that have high private market valuations but are sort of getting big enough to be noticed by regulators.

It shouldn't be surprising that anyone would play with all of the levers and dials they have at their disposal and they're wealthy enough to play the "don't like the rules: change them" game. All that being said, the piece is sort of tone deaf and just written poorly, but I cannot say I can argue with a VC firm going to bat for its portfolio companies, little tech or otherwise.

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