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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

I hope she wins, but this issue is a lot bigger than this one case, and what we also need is a new law that holds investors responsible for the conduct of the people they fund. Right now, they can fund frat boys and while the frat boys get sued for sexual harassment or domestic abuse, the investors are scot-free. Indeed, the appeal of Silicon Valley and VC is the disposable company. (As in... don't like what has attached itself to your creation? Shoot it in the head.) But this allows founder quality levels to reach an all-time low, and it's time to reverse course by holding investors responsible for the character of the people they fund.

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There's no way to write a law like this that isn't open to horrific abuse. If investors are going to be held responsible for their management's criminal activities, the law isn't just going to be used in Silicon Valley. I don't want to be held liable the next time I buy a few hundred shares of a company whose managers fuck up and (defraud mortgage borrowers|turn NJ into a superfund site|whatever).

I'm generally very supportive of your observations about the feudal nature of Silicon Valley -- but this isn't one of your finest moments.

> "I don't want to be held liable the next time I buy a few hundred shares of a company whose managers fuck up"

how is this fair? we want investors to make intelligent decisions, right? not just play roulette?

No, I actually agree with him insofar as such a law would require a definition of "investor" that doesn't hold small, passive investors responsible.

If you're a VC and you fund a frat boy and he creates a discriminatory culture, you should be held financially liable for any sexual harassment cases that come against him, because you created the startup (and, often, his career) and you were his manager, even if the corporate structure allows you to deny the fact on technicalities. (At least, let me go this far: you should be as liable as his manager would be, meaning that you fall hard if you knew or should have known.) If you're an employee who exercised his options, you shouldn't be liable for management's fuckups.

I'm not talking about applying the law to everyone who owns shares. That would be ridiculous, and would take down a large number of employees.

I should have clarified. I want career-making, lead investors to be liable. The people who created Evan Spiegel should be held responsible if he creates a company with a discriminatory culture. Not everyone who holds a few hundred shares; just people who either played a role, by investing, in creating the thing. In other words, investor-bosses, not all investors.

I wouldn't necessarily apply this to all crimes and, in fact, I'd be willing to have a law that only applies to civil claims, since civil court is where most of these cultural failures end up. I'm not going to say that I know all the details of how it should work; only that something needs to hold investors, as managers because that is what they are, responsible for the cultures of the companies they create.

> The people who created Evan Spiegel should be held responsible if he creates a company with a discriminatory culture.

You know that that's not happening though, right? I mean, the idea is so far-fetched and unrealistic that it's comical. The first step would be to merely hold Spiegel responsible for what he did: aaaand nothing is happening. Nothing will ever happen. But you want to go two steps ahead and hold investors responsible for Spiegel's behavior? That's laughably naive.

Consider, for example, that one of Reddit's big investors is a pimp. No, that's not a fucking joke. He was straight up selling women's bodies to be used sexually. We're not holding people who sell women's bodies for sex accountable... and yet you want to go a few steps further and hold people responsible for other people's conduct?

Is there an assertion that Spiegel has actually created a discriminatory culture at Snapchat?

Or are we leaping to that conclusion based on idiotic emails he wrote in his late teens/early 20s in college and the notion that a leopard doesn't change his spots?

Might we expect that a CEO would act differently in his company than a fraternity social chair?

If he's kept it up and continues to act in that same way as CEO, by all means hold him responsible (he presumably reports to the board). Trying to hold a lead investor/VC responsible is not going to be workable in the small and certainly not in the general case.

Absent a specific, current claim, I'll give him enough credit to evaluate his current actions and not hold him to account for emails that surfaced from years ago and in a completely different context (even though I find the emails appalling).

michaelochurch is part of the "spread the blame as far and as wide as possible" culture. "Others must be punished" if they just happen to know someone.

There's a political agenda behind all of this that I don't need to get into.

But you want to go two steps ahead and hold investors responsible for Spiegel's behavior? That's laughably naive.

Oh, it probably is. Someone has to propose radical ideas or moderate changes never happen. Radicalism is the role I've had to take on these issues, for a variety of reasons not worth getting into.

To be honest, I'm nearly burnt out on the anti-VC radicalism. And my actual views are fairly moderate, not that I can express nuance in a world full of corporate apologists (Valley libertarians) who worship money/success regardless of its origin, and who have to have their idols crushed. See, I have a good job, a good life, and I find that I care less about VC and stupid techie tricks by the year. I prefer to learn about Haskell or new machine learning techniques; that's a lot more intellectually stimulating than "VC-istan". That said, a replacement for me on the anti-VC radicalism front hasn't emerged. I'd love to find one so I can play the moderate.

There's a value in being a screaming maniac, which is that your words echo in your adversaries' minds in their moments of doubt and darkness, which means that you have a chance at planting in them the seeds that take them down for good... but I prefer the moderate stance when possible. We just need a really effective screaming maniac because, even if they aren't much for nuance, they have important morale effects in terms of galvanizing the good and shaking the bad. Right now, I haven't met anyone who can and will do what I do on HN.

Consider, for example, that one of Reddit's big investors is a pimp. No, that's not a fucking joke. He was straight up selling women's bodies to be used sexually. We're not holding people who sell women's bodies for sex accountable...

Whoa. Can you say who? I've never heard of this. That is... disgusting and horrifying.

I think we probably agree that such people should be held accountable.

> Whoa. Can you say who? I've never heard of this. That is... disgusting and horrifying.

https://www.reddit.com/user/Here_Comes_The_King

P.S. I was so tempted to just say jedberg.

Small meta-comment: it's very annoying to see your comments consistently downvoted (even when you're not playing your shtick).

> Oh, it probably is. Someone has to propose radical ideas or moderate changes never happen. Radicalism is the role I've had to take on these issues, for a variety of reasons not worth getting into.

So, I appreciate your line of reasoning here, but I'm not sure if it's the most effective one. In fact, I think your approach is getting you the exact opposite result of what you want. The thing is, playing a radical is extremely hard, hard especially when you aren't even that genuinely radical. Stallman plays a radical superbly, and I think that really is because he genuinely believes everything he says. I fear that when you say radical things, they can be served as arsenal for the other side, who coopts your arguments as reductio ad absurdum devices for opposite goals.

> Whoa. Can you say who? I've never heard of this. That is... disgusting and horrifying.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080621111652/http://www.rolling... Perhaps the greatest pity is we, and the VC's, including Sam Altman, celebrate him.

Did something happen to you? This seems like an absurdly high bar.

The better question to ask of Michael Church would be what hasn't happened to him, from his perspective. (Then disregard his answer.)

What do you mean "Did something happen to you?" The comment by moc is a pretty standard moc comment.

(Just curious to know what you meant)

His view is that in the valley, the VC investor relationship to founders is more like an employer/employee relationship.

I happen to think that is true to some extent. For all the...excess...in MoC's commentary, there are kernels of truths that people who have drunk the SV/VC kool aide are made uncomfortable by.

The investors don't get off scot-free; if the company tanks because of sexual harassment, their investment fails. For that matter, if consumers cared about the character of CEOs, this problem simply wouldn't exist.

I don't think that that would be a good law, but they do say that these sort of problems start from the top, and so it's no surprise that we have these issues in the tech industry - the CEOs are beholden to their investors, and if this is the culture that is present, one has to wonder what message it sends to the companies they fund.

VCs need to police their own, or those funding the VC firms need to take their money elsewhere if we are to see a fix to this.

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