This is bizarre. I don't think anyone would argue that it would be great to have more diverse venture-backed businesses in the world, but the fact that the government is spending time scrutinizing private investment firms' portfolios just doesn't make any sense to me.
> the witnesses at the single-panel hearing include Sallie Krawcheck, the CEO and Co-Founder of ‘Ellevest’, Marceau Michel, Founder of ‘Black Founders Matter’, Abbey Wemimo, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of ‘Esusu’ and Maryam Haque, Executive Director of ‘Venture Forward’.
That team of people is making the case that they should get funded instead, or brought in as consultants to help ensure that Sequoia, Y Combinator and A16Z don't get dragged back to Congress and yelled at again.
Public pensions are too risky and create a terrible moral hazard. We ought to eliminate all defined benefit pension plans and convert them into defined contribution plans such as 401(k).
Tech bro culture at its worst, is still orders of magnitude more socially acceptable than culture are frats, finance bros, law firms, hollywood, sports teams or worst.of.them all : politicians.
I don't think this is accurate, certainly law firms are ahead of technology firms and I think traditional finance firms are ahead of crypto firms. I'm not sure how frats are relevant here, nor sports teams.
Why shouldn't government officials understand how private investment firms may contribute to societal problems? Their job is to pass laws that may impact the firms. Should they be ignorant of what's going on?
The fact that the government is spending time scrutinizing private investment firms' portfolios just doesn't make any sense to me.
It's called "overriding public interest", and until the bros get their act together -- the big ole Nanny State is going to have to step in, and teach them a thing or two.
You don't have to like it -- but it's hard to see what the mystery is here.
In France, what was one of the most famous "accelerator" (the Family) used to advice to none white men first time funders to pick a startup idea they can bootstrap because they will face clear (unconscious) discrimination when looking to raise funds...
When you have a tech startup, you're building two things. First, you're building the product (or service) you're trying to sell the market. In the old days when things made sense, you got money from customers to buy or use the thing you built. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, you're building a company. In the olden times you would use your startup capital to get to the point where you could survive by retained earnings (i.e. - you made more money than you spent.) Assuming you did this correct, you had a company banking coin and you could sell all or portions of that company for cash and pay off your original investors. The price your company would fetch depended on how much profit you were making. Companies like Intel, HP and Apple all started more or less this way. Grove, Hewlett, Packard, Markkula, Faggin, Hurd, Peddle, etc. would all grok this model.
But then the tech-bros came and sold everyone on the idea that the intarwebs are so new that no one really knows how they'll make money, but they will make money and it will be great. Ads. Turns out it was ads. That's how they make money. Tech companies are really a bit more like media networks; they're just channels for ads. You've probably heard people say things like "eyeballs" and "CPM" and "subscriber growth." It's all related to how many people you can put an ad in front of. The market isn't yet saturated and you're pouring all your income into growing the business, so you make the argument the company's present value is related to its future value discounted by very murky projections of how many more people you can eventually convince to watch your ads. And that's not entirely crazy. GeoCities, Yahoo!, Broadcast.Com are companies familiar with this model. Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen and Sean Fanning rode this business model to glory in the late 1990s.
[stick with me here... i'll eventually get to the point]
But now think about the landscape if you're a VC. You have a bazillion recent Stanford grads wanting you to give them some cash. There are PLENTY of new apps and it's hard to figure out which of these crazy ideas will eventually make money. But there is a metric you can use to start to make sense of it all: Subscriber Growth. If Company A is growing it's subscribers faster than Company B, then Company A has an advantage. If it's product is "sticky" it will benefit from word of mouth and your investment capital will grow faster if you invest it in Company A (all other things being equal.) Somewhere around Y2K people began figuring this out and companies like Six Degrees, Friendster and MySpace were trying to be "sticky."
So it's now the mid-2000s and the value of a company is related to the first derivative of it's subscriber count. Google is getting into "more than just search" to expand it's customer growth numbers. Twitter and Facebook are just now launching, weaving a story for investors about near unlimited subscriber growth. Union Square plunked down a metric boatload of cash for pieces of Twitter, Tumblr, Kickstarter and Etsy.
There's now only one mandate from the investors: grow. The faster you grow, the more valuable you are. Every decision your company makes is viewed through the lens of rapid growth. Subtle UX changes suddenly become important as companies realize subscribers are fickle and won't waste time on a janky site that looks like it's from 1996. Horizontal scaling (and every bit of instrumentation that follows from it) become critical to your company's tech stack. Why do you use Docker and/or AWS? Because it allows you to scale to meet subscriber growth. You can't ignore horizontal scaling and expect people to give you money.
In the old days the idea was to grow the business and IPO (or get bought by a public company) so you can exchange your stock tokens for real cash. But it turns ou...
> YC doesn’t have a tech bro problem, but HN has a TechBro problem.
You would know...
user: TechBro8615
created: December 17, 2019
karma: 4317
about: yo yo yo
No, but seriously, this moniker has it's place, but at a time when we are seeing levels of inflation and costs for basic foodstuffs rising and outpacing wages why the hell aren't we seeing the CEOs of major petrol companies and food producers on the stand?
VC is a pernicious Industry that is made up ofpeople who are more like Banksters than anything resembling a Techbro, so what is the goal here? To expose how the two are equally as toxic to the World economy? I just can't see what anyone gets from this theater to take it seriously.
I feel this is cannon fodder for the masses to distract them from the Roe v Wade decision. It's pathetic and it shouldn't work, but just like how people flocked to see Zuck on the stand and made memes about how robotic he is: it served it's purpose.
> Congress hauled the big oil company CEOs in just a few months ago and berated them for daring to make a profit.
And what did it achieve? Gas is still at obscenely priced levels at the same time that businesses are forcing people back into the office.
Hence my view that it's theater more than it is a viable measure in which congress has the ability to force executives to be held accountable for their actions that compromise the national security of a nation, at a time that it is reeling from COVID and fighting a proxy war with Russia! For God's sake they were making baseball players show up to discuss steroid use, if this isn't the definition of banality then I don't know what is.
This isn't about merely about making a profit, the US exports just as much oil/gas as it imports after all, it's about how favorable ties with congress/senate can be seen as things that allowed for things to go back to business as usual after a pathetic display in which no one is held accountable for what will be a reason why the US is/will go into a recession. The same thing happens in bank hearings: I fully expect their to be a similar hearing as Russia defaults on it's debt repayment after JPM and GS bought tons of Russian debt and will need a bailout, but promise to do a better job in the future.
It is interesting that the web3 world is filled with all kinds of hype about how it's so different and more inclusive- but the venture numbers suggest otherwise.
That the numbers in general are so stark (and these percentages only reflect the percentage of companies funded who have at least one Black, Latinx, or woman on the founding team, not even that they are 'led' by them) is worthy of some serious investigation, even if a government task force isn't likely to be the solution.
I don't think just the identities of founders are the only thing broken in the VC model but it's telling that the numbers are SO crazy bad.
> That the numbers in general are so stark (and these percentages only reflect the percentage of companies funded who have at least one Black, Latinx, or woman on the founding team, not even that they are 'led' by them)
Micro-aggressions like using the term "LatinX" don't advance inclusivity.
I think its a bit of misnomer, because YC will always object to being called tech bros. But going by all the verbage on the topic, I would say a close approximation would be:
“Embedded Growth Obligator” (may sound more broish in Spanish YMMV)
(Thanks Weinstein!)
In more familiar but less wieldy parlance, it might be
“Rationalist non-lifestyle Hustler”
There is a bit of of an accusation of hypocrisy too, that is, YC and its organ HN will say they pander in service of curiosity, but its more like the other way round. (Make things people want! Spread your ideology later!) If thats not in itself a lifestyle its at least a narrow perspective on ikigai— perhaps summarized as “Learn Or Earn”
I would say I am not an example of techbro, because I spend time on replying to your statement without any consideration of the victory conditions.
34 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 87.6 ms ] threadThat team of people is making the case that they should get funded instead, or brought in as consultants to help ensure that Sequoia, Y Combinator and A16Z don't get dragged back to Congress and yelled at again.
Tech bro culture at its worst, is still orders of magnitude more socially acceptable than culture are frats, finance bros, law firms, hollywood, sports teams or worst.of.them all : politicians.
It's called "overriding public interest", and until the bros get their act together -- the big ole Nanny State is going to have to step in, and teach them a thing or two.
You don't have to like it -- but it's hard to see what the mystery is here.
In France, what was one of the most famous "accelerator" (the Family) used to advice to none white men first time funders to pick a startup idea they can bootstrap because they will face clear (unconscious) discrimination when looking to raise funds...
But then the tech-bros came and sold everyone on the idea that the intarwebs are so new that no one really knows how they'll make money, but they will make money and it will be great. Ads. Turns out it was ads. That's how they make money. Tech companies are really a bit more like media networks; they're just channels for ads. You've probably heard people say things like "eyeballs" and "CPM" and "subscriber growth." It's all related to how many people you can put an ad in front of. The market isn't yet saturated and you're pouring all your income into growing the business, so you make the argument the company's present value is related to its future value discounted by very murky projections of how many more people you can eventually convince to watch your ads. And that's not entirely crazy. GeoCities, Yahoo!, Broadcast.Com are companies familiar with this model. Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen and Sean Fanning rode this business model to glory in the late 1990s.
[stick with me here... i'll eventually get to the point]
But now think about the landscape if you're a VC. You have a bazillion recent Stanford grads wanting you to give them some cash. There are PLENTY of new apps and it's hard to figure out which of these crazy ideas will eventually make money. But there is a metric you can use to start to make sense of it all: Subscriber Growth. If Company A is growing it's subscribers faster than Company B, then Company A has an advantage. If it's product is "sticky" it will benefit from word of mouth and your investment capital will grow faster if you invest it in Company A (all other things being equal.) Somewhere around Y2K people began figuring this out and companies like Six Degrees, Friendster and MySpace were trying to be "sticky."
So it's now the mid-2000s and the value of a company is related to the first derivative of it's subscriber count. Google is getting into "more than just search" to expand it's customer growth numbers. Twitter and Facebook are just now launching, weaving a story for investors about near unlimited subscriber growth. Union Square plunked down a metric boatload of cash for pieces of Twitter, Tumblr, Kickstarter and Etsy.
There's now only one mandate from the investors: grow. The faster you grow, the more valuable you are. Every decision your company makes is viewed through the lens of rapid growth. Subtle UX changes suddenly become important as companies realize subscribers are fickle and won't waste time on a janky site that looks like it's from 1996. Horizontal scaling (and every bit of instrumentation that follows from it) become critical to your company's tech stack. Why do you use Docker and/or AWS? Because it allows you to scale to meet subscriber growth. You can't ignore horizontal scaling and expect people to give you money.
In the old days the idea was to grow the business and IPO (or get bought by a public company) so you can exchange your stock tokens for real cash. But it turns ou...
You would know...
user: TechBro8615 created: December 17, 2019 karma: 4317 about: yo yo yo
No, but seriously, this moniker has it's place, but at a time when we are seeing levels of inflation and costs for basic foodstuffs rising and outpacing wages why the hell aren't we seeing the CEOs of major petrol companies and food producers on the stand?
VC is a pernicious Industry that is made up ofpeople who are more like Banksters than anything resembling a Techbro, so what is the goal here? To expose how the two are equally as toxic to the World economy? I just can't see what anyone gets from this theater to take it seriously.
I feel this is cannon fodder for the masses to distract them from the Roe v Wade decision. It's pathetic and it shouldn't work, but just like how people flocked to see Zuck on the stand and made memes about how robotic he is: it served it's purpose.
https://energycommerce.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings...
And what did it achieve? Gas is still at obscenely priced levels at the same time that businesses are forcing people back into the office.
Hence my view that it's theater more than it is a viable measure in which congress has the ability to force executives to be held accountable for their actions that compromise the national security of a nation, at a time that it is reeling from COVID and fighting a proxy war with Russia! For God's sake they were making baseball players show up to discuss steroid use, if this isn't the definition of banality then I don't know what is.
This isn't about merely about making a profit, the US exports just as much oil/gas as it imports after all, it's about how favorable ties with congress/senate can be seen as things that allowed for things to go back to business as usual after a pathetic display in which no one is held accountable for what will be a reason why the US is/will go into a recession. The same thing happens in bank hearings: I fully expect their to be a similar hearing as Russia defaults on it's debt repayment after JPM and GS bought tons of Russian debt and will need a bailout, but promise to do a better job in the future.
That the numbers in general are so stark (and these percentages only reflect the percentage of companies funded who have at least one Black, Latinx, or woman on the founding team, not even that they are 'led' by them) is worthy of some serious investigation, even if a government task force isn't likely to be the solution.
I don't think just the identities of founders are the only thing broken in the VC model but it's telling that the numbers are SO crazy bad.
Micro-aggressions like using the term "LatinX" don't advance inclusivity.
“Embedded Growth Obligator” (may sound more broish in Spanish YMMV)
(Thanks Weinstein!)
In more familiar but less wieldy parlance, it might be “Rationalist non-lifestyle Hustler”
There is a bit of of an accusation of hypocrisy too, that is, YC and its organ HN will say they pander in service of curiosity, but its more like the other way round. (Make things people want! Spread your ideology later!) If thats not in itself a lifestyle its at least a narrow perspective on ikigai— perhaps summarized as “Learn Or Earn”
I would say I am not an example of techbro, because I spend time on replying to your statement without any consideration of the victory conditions.