Ask HN: Do you aspire to be a venture capitalist?

I started to notice a trend amongst VC partners. They talk a big talk, but most of them are pretty risk averse and will only invest if someone else jumps the gun first. A lot of times, there will be multiple VCs interested in a company but they will bullshit the founders about wanting to invest, and just sit around waiting for someone else to invest so they can jump on the bandwagon.

What I find different about AH is that they invest when they want to invest, and don't care if other VCs are interested. Social proof isn't that important to them. And it's pretty crazy...they'll invest in a company that nobody else has been talking about and then out of nowhere the entire VC industry is throwing money at them.

a16z == Andreessen Horowitz

reminds me of this, not sure about equity but "come build cool" is more important than "get next round"

http://www.raizlabs.com/services/startup-incubator/

OK. Sounds great.

Please put your contact info in your HN profile.

The comment he made was with regard to the mentality they have when determining whether to deploy capital, not so much the legal and financial structure of their deals.

You can see the full context here, worded better originally than I could hope to paraphrase:

http://bubbleinvestment.com/qa-with-aswath-damodaran-nyu-pro...

20% of 30%+ IRR returns (which is representative of the top quartile) is more substantial than a 2% management fee

Absolutely, and that's why I qualified my statement with 'largely'. A sweeping generalization would have been irresponsible of me.

I agree with your premise, but not the notion that getting rich randomly is unfair. It is often irrationally regarded as unfair however.

For it to actually be unfair, there has to be a legitimately injured party. As an example, Flappy Bird's creator didn't injure anybody, and did not take anything from anyone else (I'm not sure if you can get more random, for this discussion, than that product's brief but sensational rise).

There's no possibility of objectively defining the random aspect - what qualifies as random and what doesn't (varying from lottery winners to someone claiming Paul Allen fits the category). That logic hint makes it clear that the idea that getting rich randomly is unfair, is an invalid notion to begin with. It falls into the same camp as thinking that all wealth in general is unfair - a strictly subjective feeling, typically derived from a person's philosophy on life.

I'm indifferent to the situation. I don't hate traders & I don't hate VCs. I quite admire the few I've met. In a sense, one could say traders embody the essence of the human spirit. They provide an essential service for the markets, as you say, and that's fine.

I just don't desire to be a part of it.

Not sure why you got downvoted. This comment opened up my eyes to the reason why I am biased against traders. If I dislike people who are rewarded for the risks that they take I should also be sympathetic to those who took those risks and lost.

Your comment is (largely) ignorant of what I actually wrote.

Several of the industry specific firms are pretty new, actually.

The main challenge is time, not opportunity. I'm at a top tier "unicorn" startup right now, and my next best alternative is founding another startup. I probably would walk for a partnership track position in a top firm, but that's it. (Or "fix all of apple's online services", build apple's enterprise business, "make android or chromeos secure and secure against third party doctrine", secure the usg, or spacex, but nothing else.)

There are some great niches in tech investing outside of early stage startups (a PE focused on turnarounds of ducked companies like yahoo or twitter?), but in early stage, if you aren't getting the top deals (by being known as top tier generally or in your market), why bother?

Sure - there's not much to tell. I was one of the founders of a venture-backed startup that raised a couple of rounds of funding from a set of VCs. I had/have pretty good relationships with a few of those, plus some other connections that I'd made through that process. Every once in a while I get a call or an email from one of them asking my opinion about an industry, a technology, or a specific company. From there it could be anything from a quick phone call, to a chat with the startup in question, to a full due diligence of their business and technology. Usually I'm involved either at the very early stages, "We're interested in maybe making an investment or three in this category", or very late, "We want to invest in this company, can you take a look at their technology and tell us what you think?"