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Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't look like any smart money on this one yet, but there's something bold about it. It's like Nassim Taleb's thing that you hire the ugly surgeon. This is one hideous surgeon. Fraud seems near impossible here.

[Edit: a lot of thoughtful responses but downvoting?]

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Matt Levine (financial columnist) often makes the point (or joke) that in fund management there a tendency to reward (as in: they get more money to manage) people who lost a lot of money, on the basis that they did manage to have a lot of money to start with, make bold bets, and should at least have learned something at this point.

That is not unique to fund managers.

Second time entrepreneurs are more likely to raise capital even if their first venture failed and spectacularly so.

Adam Neumann got funded by a16z(their largest?) despite all the governance issues at Wework , there are many other examples of high profile and regular entrepreneurs getting funding .

The difference is that Neumann didn't attempt to conceal his scam in the slightest, and more importantly, he didn't break any laws, just screwed over his investors.

> just screwed over his investors.

> didn't break any laws,

To VCs, I would imagine the first is bigger disqualification than the second.

Startups are modeled around breaking laws to disrupt all the time. Ask for forgiveness than permission mentality.

Uber and Airbnb did it with taxi, breaking privacy laws in Europe by ad supported tech or fintech with AML/KYC securities law or more recently on copyright law to build their training data by ai companies . All of these depend on law being broken to succeed.

Calculating the risk of prosecution and the size of the penalty with upside of doing it anyway happens in these companies all the time.

Yes, but in that example, he specifically says the ugly surgeon has to be as high-profile as the carefully-coiffed, megawatt-smile, could-have-just-walked-off-the-Chicago-Hope-set surgeon you're comparing him to. It's a heuristic for choosing between experts of roughly the same rank.

If everyone uncritically invests because the Holmes association is perceived as making fraud impossible, then the association has actually had the opposite effect.

This is literally a rule that is entirely dependent on the rule itself not being popular.

I hear what you're saying, but counterexamples (i.e. repeat scammers) abound.

Maybe Taleb's works should be added to that blog post - leading on HN today - about the questionable value of lay business books.

Taleb took payment to promote cryptocurrency scammer Craig Wright and his BSV scamtoken.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

What are you talking about? The conference where he talked as a critic of digital assets? Confused

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