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Comment by huevosabio | Hacker News Reader

It feels like a very Adam Neumann move.

Sequoia did a nauseating, hilarious puff piece on him a couple months ago and this guy sounds like Adam Neumann’s second coming.

https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlig...

Will need the Wayback Machine as they are trying to damage control: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...

>But, right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red-brick floor, SBF’s purpose in life was set: He was going to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake. All the rest was merely execution risk.

> SBF himself has amassed more wealth in a shorter period of time than anyone else, ever. The 2022 Forbes Billionaires List pegs SBF’s net worth at $24 billion. He’s now 30 years old. But we get ahead of ourselves.

This is just gold.

Hopefully this all circus going down will also bring down all the phonies from VC companies like Sequoia Capital, guys (they're mostly guys, of course) who still live off the few successful bets they made in the early 2000s. We need fraudster-enablers like Sequoia to actually go bust if we really want for our industry to find its lustre again and for real innovation to come back.

Later edit: I've mostly gone through all of it, and I have to say that that that archived article is pure genius, it has copy-paste-ble gem after copy-paste-ble gem. It would most probably deserve its own, separate submission, on HN.

In a saner investment environment that sort of article, and the huge fraud the people behind it helped perpetuate by giving this SBF guy money (one of the Skype founders, really? the rationalist community, really?) should help bring some people down, and in so doing leaving our industry, well, cleaner.

But I'm pretty sure that nothing like that will happen, the small fries will be too scared to call these people out as fraudster-enablers, thinking that they might need money from them at some future point, the other sharks in the pool will behave like nothing has ever happened, hoping that the regulatory powers that be will move along, to say nothing of the politicians, after all, to quote Vox, SBF is "one of Biden’s biggest donors" [1].

To re-capitulate, one of the US president's biggest donors has just defrauded people out of $10 billion (that we know of) while some of the biggest figures/institutions in the US tech industry had stood behind him. Business as usual in the rules-based United States.

[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/20/22335209/sam-bankman-fr...

A nice quote that seems rather relevant right now: > To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.

When I was first read it I thought it was a parody, Silicon Valley style.

But Sequoia this prestigious VC has been shown to be childish, incompetent, reckless and completely unprofessional.

It will be forever be a stain on them.

I managed to get this screenshot at least:

https://twitter.com/findgriffin/status/1590822569883873280

HN discussion (138 comments so far): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549059

That link is taking me to a "oh shit our bad" sort of page now, but I'm curious on the date. I don't see an original timestamp on the wayback machine version, though. :(

If they were still taking him seriously as "ethical" after the Luna fiasco where he had previously trashed it in press (as the scheme was just a perpetual motion machine) but was perfectly willing to make money off of poor suckers who got conned... I don't know what to say.

Google's webcache has it

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33...

Self dealing

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