I want to live to see these tools being deployed in VC offices. What are these guys doing anyway besides going to the gym, having coffee dates, and putting out BS posts on X?!
A rank & file VC is essentially a salesman. Their job is to understand everything that's going on in their sector, and have warm intros available so they can sell the founders of the actually-promising startups on having their firm invest. In general, you don't do this in the office. You get out and meet lots of people in the industry.
Likewise, if you're a founder going into fundraising mode, your full-time job is to be a salesman. You go out and meet lots of investors and blow shit up their ass so they all believe you're the next hot thing, and then you play them off against each others so they keep escalating their termsheets. I've had founders tell me that everything you do in the fundraising game is performative - you should treat it like a months-long acting gig where everything you do is designed to elicit the desired emotional reaction to get investors to open their portfolios.
You’re describing influencers who also happen to be VCs. Plenty of—perhaps most—successful VCs have no public profile.
When I was young I worked at a startup where the CEO was out of the office most of the time.
One of my coworkers was irate about how he had to work hard, while the CEO was out there doing who knows what. Being young and impressionable it started to rub me the wrong way, too.
Eventually one of the older guys informed me that the CEO was going out on sales trips to potential customers, meeting with investors, and doing a number of other in-person things that the company needed. That's why he wasn't in the office.
I felt foolish for thinking that his job and my job should look the same and occur in the office.
The disgruntled coworker didn't care, though. He wanted the CEO to be butts-in-seats and staring at a monitor because that's the only type of work he understood. I get the same vibes when people sneer at VCs for stuff like "meeting people all day". That's their job.
Sure is convenient while they chafe at the actual laborers for taking too many bathroom breaks.
VCs’ job is to raise money. Sexy founders and past returns help with that. But the money is essentially booked when an LP signs a commitment.
Their job is to travel around, meet people, find new opportunities and network.
Go to Disney? Make sure to book the Grand Floridian or Four Seasons (not hardware store) and make sure to let all your contacts know you are in town.
Probably won't even go to the parks, just spend your time meeting with other ultra high wealth individuals.
Going to a conference? Make sure you have 3-5 other meet and greets planned such that you are always going from person to person.
Its a job that most people on this forum cannot even imagine.
By it's very nature it has to be excessive, because the ultra wealthy live a life of excess.
Not saying its hard, it is just different.
This describes anyone at the top of their field. A star engineer or academic can spend their time however they please. (And giving them that freedom is generally a profitable bet.)
> By it's very nature it has to be excessive, because the ultra wealthy live a life of excess
It really doesn’t. It just glances with excess. You can pitch your company at Cannes or the Super Bowl without buying tickets to the events.
Lots of drugs.
Our modern rich were raised in a more religious time and our understanding of neuroscience today makes it pretty obvious they're still just patronizing geezers who think we owe validation of their story.
When by the numbers every billionaire could not wake up tomorrow and we'd barely notice. It's not even a school shootings worth of victims.
All their "be metrics driven" gibberish did not work out the way they'd hoped. Just a handful of morons humanity will carry on without some day.
* Opposition to surveilance? Check
* Stereotyping and hating on management types? Check
* Cynical flippant comment? Check
* Small jab at X? Check
I think worker surveillance is pretty awful myself but I just don't think this comment will lead to high quality replies. There's very little light and mostly heat in this comment but it will jive with the community culture strong enough to generate a bunch of grievance-oriented replies. The purpose of this comment is mostly to remind readers that we can strongly dislike something without reaching for low-effort ragebait to criticize it. Honestly, worker surveillance is so dumb it should be simple to dump on it factually.
You should consider contributing to the discussion instead of making off-topic, passive-aggressive comments policing what people are allowed to like, discussing stereotypes while directly stereotyping OP and this community in general.
Sure. But it’s appropriate to point out that it’s low cognitive effort venting.
OP could have done that with more tact, and more constructively. But it’s ironic that turning this into a “what have VCs done for you lately” rant plays into their advantage by turning a system that involves certain skills and differentiated abilities into an ersatz caste system, where apparently the idea of taking a client to dinner is somehow unfathomable for mere engineers.
You vaguely gesture at this being somehow negative. We can strongly dislike something while recognizing the forces behind that something as well. Employee surveillance does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in the same continuum of RTO, of mass layoffs while corporations make record profits, etc and so forth.
The only reason I made this comment is because as HN has been getting a lot bigger post-2022 Reddit API changes, I've been noticing a lot more low effort rage/engagement bait in the comments. The mods here have added the "Don't be curmudgeonly" guideline recently to combat this trend but I think the bait is really degrading the quality of conversation here to the point where this might as well just be any old generic comments section on the net. At some point HN falls into the same problem that every newspaper comments section, Reddit, and Nextdoor fell into: farming ragebait for approval removes the incentives needed for quality discourse and crowds non-ragebait out. I think some of this too is that the right now HN is growing faster than the mod team can deal with the comments.
I think it's largely a losing battle, but I'll try because I've spent too much on this site to not try. But I will be honest I am spending a lot less time here because of this decrease in quality.
(I'm also cognizant that I broke an HN guideline, namely "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.")
Alas, communities are what people make of them, and they change as people enter and leave those communities.