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Comment by idop | Hacker News Reader

VCs want founders who are willing to play the game and can do it well: lying to (potential) customers, making insane promises, presenting fake demos as if they were real products and using fancy accounting tricks to make the business look profitable, when in fact it is bleeding their money, all so that they can easily find _other_ investors to bail them out. VCs have perfected legal Ponzi schemes.

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Back when Andreessen Horowitz was investing heavily in ICOs I realized that their business was essentially offering their LPs legal access to the ground floor of scams. Every time one of the ICOs turned out to be a fraud they could say "We had no idea, we're one of the victims!"

This, in turn, probably led directly to FTX. They did laughably bad diligence on FTX because they needed to do bad diligence in order to retain plausible deniability.

Interesting take. Surely, VC's have created some very large, profitable, innovative entities.

But I wonder if the nature of the industry is such that it attracts some moneyed folks who lack ethics and talent for business. To make up for that lack, they effectively "scam" investors.

Surely, there are some great VC partners who can identify unique talent and business opportunities. But there are probably more individuals who happened into the position from wealth (e.g. Ivy education, wealthy families) who lack both sufficient real world experience and business context.

To be precise, they don't scam their LP investors, in fact they did generate nice returns to them with those ICO scams. The retail investors who bought the garbage at high valuations were the end target for the scam.

Meanwhile for example AH has made investments also to legit startups.

Were any of the “retail investors” who lost money investing in a product approved by the SEC? If not, how is it any different from investing with a random person who approaches you on the street with “a great opportunity to make money”? Why would your expectation of being cheated be any different?

Right. VCs are involved in one stage of the formation of companies, with repeat games. This creates certain incentives and biases. One such incentive is to drive hype for other investors. And one bias is that they tend to see startups and founders as a homogeneous cohort. This is normal, but should not be touted as gospel any more than other players.

The weird undertone that permeates the debate around VCs is that they are somehow the embodiment of some deeper wisdom – that others should pay attention for some universal reason – that they sit on the key to success. It’s just a particular type of player in a market economy. There’s absolutely nothing special about them. Of course they have something to say, like any other profession. But when the thought leading leather jacket comes on, and hot takes start to replace actual semantic sentences, it’s time to tune out.

VCs can act as gurus for a certain sort of idealistic founder types who also have a need for validation. VC funding resembles the traditional form of validation that we are raised with, namely an authority figure conferring acceptance. I can see this as a hedge against the extreme uncertainty of starting a new venture. However, IMO, this need for approval from authority as an adult is ultimately psychological vulnerability and it is exploited.

Obviously, not every funding case is like this. But when young founders lead more with who has funded them than what they’re building or done, I have to wonder.

Feels weird defending VC's but here we go: I'm not sure what your experience is dealing with actual VC's? Are you a founder?

In my experience with some top tier VC's none of the above is true. At least none of the VC partners I work with has ever even suggested "lying to customers", "making up numbers" or anything like that.

Sure, looking bigger than you are is useful. Not airing dirty laundry. Also aggressively going after customers is normal. But this is normal for any business.

If you're looking at a basket of investments from the pension fund level, 90% of that basket is going to be highly predictable risk, derisked in a highly predicable manner. Those same people try to exert that down into VC a little bit by way of LP agreements, typically by way of restrictions. For example for some funds I'm an LP in, they can only target 10% ownership, not more, not less, so by virtue of that, it is an "OPM game" (other peoples money) as one GP at a sandhill road firm once described it as. And it's true, VC is just that: an individual firms standard divination risk environment, derisked by (often only), distributing the risk using an OPM strategy.

This system isn't really great, so your snark is justified, and the reason I know that is true is: pension funds are starting to experiment with cutting out the VC funnel and spinning up venture studios instead (Koru).

VCs want carbon copies of themselves, socioeconomically and politically, taking the the risks they would if they had the situations of their founders. If you're not them, slightly sifted in circumstance, basically them, they see you as prey.

Reality distortion is the job.

> VCs have perfected legal Ponzi schemes.

Exactly. They know it is a giant ponzi scheme as we have seen with SVB collapsing right in front of their faces, throwing millions on unprofitable startups which 90% of them will never make it to the finish line and it was never sustainable and they knew it. A perfect example of a ZIRP (zero interest rate phenomenon) with decades long cheap money fuelling it.

To them, they see your startup as a vehicle for an IPO to dump all over retail investors at an inflated price, which is why they need to keep raising money every month.

If it works out, on to the next one. If it doesn't then either they force you out of your own company an drive an acquisition to prevent the loss of their own money or accept the loss and never to meet the founders again.

What connection does SVB bank has in this??

SVB failed due to them tying up too much cash in long term securities, rate hikes and then a bank run. https://www.economicsobservatory.com/why-did-silicon-valley-...

Yes, they were THE bank for startups, but shitty startups did not cause the bank to collapse.

Do you have any data to support that claim? What proportion of a VC firm’s returns come from a later round’s investors if a firm never has a liquidity event? (IPO or acquisition) And if the firm fails before then, how does the vc firm get paid?

A ponzi scheme is a way of stealing from investors, but it only works if the perpetrator can actually take cash out - in vc, I’ve never heard of a vc firm being able to take cash “off the table” in a later financing round, other than what is meant to be the terminal event for a vc investment, IPO / acquisition.

It's called a "secondary"[1] and it's extremely common. It's how both investors and founders make millions on startups long before an acquisition or IPO, often before the startups are profitable.

As for my take on VCs in general, of course I don't have any actual data to support my rant, it's purely anecdotal based of my personal experiences and should be treated as such.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private-equity_secondary_mar...

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