Who do VCs spend their skiing trips with: ramen-fed, sleep-deprived startup founders, or other VCs? Of course, they hang out with each other.
Same with executives at large companies. They might be nominally "competitors", but they've already learned that they have more in common with one another than with employees in the companies they run.
I guess I'm cynical, but I'm not surprised. I wouldn't have expected some specific individuals (I thought more of Eric Schmidt; I always liked him) to be involved but the behavior is not shocking. Yes, it's shitty and illegal. No, it's not at all surprising.
Let's say that you're talking to an investor and you tell him that you're being courted by another VC and that he needs to act fast. What's the first thing he'll do, if he takes you seriously? Pick up the phone and call the guy (they were classmates in business school, and it's "bros before schmos", man.) If there was proper competition, that sort of thing would never happen.
Social class is an ugly reality and people in higher social classes always look out for each other first. The real competition is insiders vs. outsiders. Human societies are naturally conspiratorial. I don't know what the solution to this problem is (other than, individually, to just keep working hard and trying to be awesome enough that the general wankbasketry of humanity doesn't matter) but it's obvious that our current regulatory machinery is too thin.
I don't think it's just the higher classes that look out for each other, you will find inverse snobbery everywhere. It's just more visible in the higher classes because they have disproportional income and influence.
I think most people here would rather hang out with another techie from a rival company than they would with the head of marketing from their own company.
The idea that small cabals of individuals can act in collusion like this goes against the commonly held view of the economy as an anonymous force of nature that always moves toward efficient equilibrium. But sometimes that's just what happens.
Why I find "conspiracy theories" ridiculous: with "friends" (above-board entities like corporations, proud of having titled nobility... er, I mean, executives; I forgot that "America doesn't have a hereditary aristocracy") like our leading large institutions, who needs enemies? Why invent shadowy evil organizations when there are so many objectively-visible and extremely greedy (if not quite evil, and most often too stupid and poorly-run to pull off the levels of evil we imagine) ones?
The evil-evils don't meet in shadowy mansions with bad lighting and creepy piano music. They meet in private parties in Aspen and executive boardrooms and on the boards of "charities" that really exist as a scoreboard for the social status of rich people. They also don't have huge orgies. They visit prostitutes half their age whom they pay $1500/night to endure their post-coital crying about their mistakes (such as marrying dumb trophy/corporate wives and having to write high-six-figure donation checks to shove their low-IQ kids into Ivies).
There isn't "one conspiracy to rule them all", but there are lower-case-c conspiracies all over the place.
So it sounds like you don't have a problem with "conspiracy theories" after all. Neither do I. Conspiracies happen all the time, as you say.
When you talk about shadowy mansions and orgies, it sounds to me like you're invoking a straw man conspiracy. But real conspiracies are plenty shadowy (isn't that the whole idea?) The upper level meetings of the very powerful seem to be quite secretive, with great security, be they in boardrooms or at parties in Aspen.
What frustrates me is that "conspiracy theory" has just become code for "thing that can't possibly be even considered". This is the message that comes down to us whenever people want to discuss, e.g. income equality, or the reasons for going to war. People internalize this, making it difficult for them to evaluate the real everyday conspiracies that take place around them, and, of course, benefiting conspirators.
Upvote back to +1, just because I think it's interesting how words fairly arbitrarily acquire strong signed (positive or negative) meanings, e.g. awful vs. awesome, collaboration vs. collusion. It's not at all stable across languages. If you call someone a "collabo" (collaborator) in France, that's a huge insult (referring to Nazi collaborators in the Vichy era).
I think my comment is valid and on-topic. People make fun of conspiracy theories, but the fact is that conspiracies go on all the time. There is even a crime called "conspiracy", after all. It would be better to say "implausible crank theories" or something when that is what one refers to.
Thank you for bringing this fact up. "conspiracy to commit x" is an extremely common charge in our legal system.
The Orwellification of the word is such that, only when we try to apply this term to the powerful do we suddenly become crazy kooks, despite the fact that the powerful are often the ones with the motive, and certainly the means, to engage in conspiracy.
I find it amusing when well-meaning people try to dictate what a given word or phrase should mean. Language evolves in a chaotic way, often against logical arguments. You might be right, but "conspiracy theory" already has an established meaning, and you are not going to change that.
Indeed, you are free to. On occasion I've tried to do the same thing. But in practice, I don't think it usually helps. It muddies up the waters of conversation, which depend on everyone having roughly the same definitions of words. At least, you have to be careful, and know that most people won't (immediately) change, and that you're making things more complicated.
It's important to have clear and powerful linguistics. Sticky linguistics make sticky minds. Compare inuits, with their multitude of words for snow - they probably have richer and clearer discussions on snow.
The same thing is true in programming languages - eg people who go back to basics and throw out the cached thoughts that make up a web of assumptions that everyone clings to, and in the process create something weird yet powerful (like Haskell or whatever).
I know, but bringing up alternatives to entrenched meanings doesn't always make things clearer. Probably a lot of the time it's better to introduce a new term, or one that is used infrequently and doesn't have as much baggage, rather then redefining one. Redefining terms when talking to a computer is one thing, but people aren't always capable of throwing out their assumptions, and it almost always takes a long time. In the meantime, where is the discussion? The mess has to be worth it.
Allow me to interject for a due correction: the inuit "having x>>1 words for snow" is a widespread misconception; Eskimo-Aleut languages feature compounding (as German does), thus allowing an arbitrarily high number of variations of the "snow" lexeme, which can be misunderstood by very uninformed and very monolinguistic individuals (such as lousy journalists writing fillers) as being different words.
But by the same facile reasoning where modern linguistic norms are ignored in favor of older, simpler roots, "crank" just means "turn," and turning is often a good thing.
Not that I'm trying to argue against this being an evil practice, but out of curiosity, how many YC startups would consider it OK to poach staff from another YC startup? Would it cause bad feeling?
Bad feeling? Bad feelings affect all sorts of decisions, so what? That would be different than, say, YC telling companies not to do so, and the companies agreeing en mass. That would be a conspiracy of criminal conduct. But most YC companies are so small that the idea of taking a person from another tiny company, YC or not, probably would cause a "bad feeling". Give the tiny companies a break. God, I interviewed at one and they asked if I was married and had kids, because if I did, then it wouldn't work out. The answer was no, and no, and the important one was also a no. They will get better some day, but when they are so small, it doesn't matter.
Who do VCs spend their skiing trips with: ramen-fed, sleep-deprived startup founders, or other VCs? Of course, they hang out with each other.
Same with executives at large companies. They might be nominally "competitors", but they've already learned that they have more in common with one another than with employees in the companies they run.