To be fair, its hard for anyone to know anything about hardware these days unless its a company with a large on-prem footprint and it doesn't make financial or regulatory sense to put in the cloud or co-locate, which is a vanishingly small number. Hell I haven't been in a physical datacenter in 5 years and that's where I started my career many moons ago.
Its like if spanking was your fetish but the person spanking you believes they are punishing you. It's irrelevant to the person being spanked as long as they enjoy it.
I feel like this entire forum demonstrates a chronic pessimism by rejecting the idea that a deal can be a 'win-win', that somehow both participants in the deal can benefit and the world is non-zero
Yes you're right and I was not saying otherwise. I was trying to point out that it's more the exception than the rule. The entire other 99% of the thread, and the OP topic itself is suggesting that relationships can only be win-lose
Hilarious, but an apt analogy. It might make more sense to say that anyone who doesn't work for themselves is being taken advantage of - that said, I prefer the simplicity of punching the clock to the scramble of running my own business, so I guess I'm a masochist too.
They're interested in making money, not providing a social service. There's certainly a problem there, but it's not the VCs' responsibility.
You are more likely to succeed in your business if you have the experience of building scalable systems, like at google, and if you have a similar friend group to recruit talent from, which is extremely hard at an early startup unless you already know the kinds of people you disproportionately meet at top universities and tech companies, and if you have family/friends that can help you out while you're struggling at the beginning of the startup, etc.
You are less likely to succeed if you have the financial encumberances that are common outside of the upper middle class, or if you have an unstable family structure that leans weight on you, if you don't have a safety net to lean on to get you through rough periods without personal income, and if you don't have the kind of network that a top school, top company, or connected family brings.
I came from a working class background, taught myself how to build products, made my own connections and raised some money for a startup and had to leave and return the money because there was a nonzero chance I'd have to adopt my nephew to keep him from the foster system, and couldn't possibly do that with the hours and volatility of that game. It is perfectly logical to avoid startups that have those kinds of additional risks when the game is already risky.
We absolutely should try to assuage those biases to improve economic mobility, but the answer isn't just to yell at VCs for trying to make money.
You make some valid points, but I really dislike the above comment. When used it seems like a convenient way to diffuse responsibility, often to selfish ends.
There's lots of examples where this type of single-minded attitude isn't acceptable.
- A civil engineer cannot just have making money be the sole pursuit when designing or building a bridge
- A doctor cannot just have making money be the only goal when treating a patient
- A government worker cannot be only concerned on how to maximize their individual gains when awarding contracts
- A financial adviser is expected to act in their client's best interest, rather than their own
We're used to expecting certain levels of ethical behavior from some professions acting within a larger societal framework. I don't know why investing is so often left off the hook in this regard. Maybe it's naive, but I think we'd be better of if people told themselves it WAS their responsibility when making these decisions.
Leveling society's playing field is a far different scale of responsibility than a civil engineering designing a safe bridge or a doctor looking out for their patient. Societal level problems need societal level organizations to solve, such as governments.
We should be voting for policies that strengthen the nation as a whole. A VC giving up a few % point in return in exchange for betting on poorer people is not going to change anything, other than that VC losing investors. We want to fix families? Well let's guarantee parents have time home with their children, let's guarantee they have sick leave and parental leave and vacation leave to spend with their families. Let's provide more transit and infrastructure and education to communities that need it.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's VC's job to create a solution of that scale. My position was that it's a weak position to wash one's hand of any responsibility because their stance is that they have a singularly focused job.
I would hope, for instance, that Boeing software engineers wouldn't take the stance that their job is to code to requirements and the safety engineers job to make sure the requirements are safe. I would hope everyone has the onus to look at the greater landscape for the impacts of their decisions rather than using a myopic view to skirt responsibility because it's convenient or easy.
Most VCs I've met do have some kind of value system other than making money that permeates their investment decisions, it's just usually one that is easier to align or at least doesn't run contrary to their business interests, like making large systems more efficient or spreading access to goods and services traditionally restricted to the rich by driving down costs.
Socioeconomic mobility is really much easier to pull on with policy and the education system.
Some people do work on trying to democratize entrepreneurship though, like YC with startup school, or Stripe with Atlas.
They do it by spreading information and reducing barriers, not by giving money to higher risk people though, since that's easier to align with their place in the system.
Yes, sorry. I didn't mean to imply that VCs, on the whole, don't have a more nuanced decision process. I meant that I dislike when ethically questionable decisions are protected by the 'ends justify the means' argument. In this case, where maximizing profit is the only end that gets any weight.
It's similarly strange to me when I hear people like Jim Cramer advocate investing in tobacco companies even if you find their business practices abhorrent because the point of the investment 'game' is to maximize profit. In his case, his solution was to take those profits and donate to a cancer charity. It just seems like a strange set of psychological hoops to jump through to avoid cognitive dissonance. It comes across that excelling at the 'game' is ultimately what's valued more than the ethics of the business decision. Again, maybe naive or poorly placed, but it seems the most moral choice is to make sure all the decisions align with your values, not creating strange workarounds so you can have your cake and eat it too.
> They do it by spreading information and reducing barriers, not by giving money to higher risk people though, since that's easier to align with their place in the system.
And it is mostly misguided. The barrier to entry and availability of information is what have already changed. It is everything else that hasn't. Or it has, but in the wrong way. By charging a premium for housing, education and contacts instead of taking it out of the equation. Some day all this friction is going to have consequences.
Those financial encumbrances exist due to VCs taking a larger share of the pie than their efforts are worth, and we can't look at their bank balances now and ignore all context as to how that money got there in the first place.
Venture capitalists are only a thing because they siphon off the working class via the exfiltration of surplus. And then they have the gall to demand percentage ownership for that money they "invest". Because they worked hard (stealing from workers) for 'their' money.
My opinion is their money is tainted from the get-go. It amounts to theft from the very people whom made the things.
Part of me is like "this is dope!" and another part of me is like "are we so lazy/poor due to income inequality that actually learning how to build things is out of the picture now?"
The desire to build stuff as a kid without the funds to buy wood/metal is what got me into programming.
I could have either bought materials for 1-3 projects and then not been able to build anything else, or build a computer (back then it was cheaper to build than buy) and then have limitless ability to build things digitally.
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. Virtual building is great because it lets people build things without having to be limited by the space they have available or the materials they have to build with (in Minecraft (creative mode, at least), you never run out of the color block that you need, unlike playing with Lego in real life).
