Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

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Somehow this same level of sloppiness, disorganization and disrespect was a mark of a great disruptive innovator just two months ago.

In the Sequoia profile they greatly admire how Bankman-Fried plays League of Legends while pitching to investors, and takes naps in his office when he’s supposed to be in meetings. How surprised can they realistically act that their genius lost 8 billion dollars in a “hidden, poorly internally labeled account”.

The investment industry needs to face their role in this debacle. The Ontario teachers’ pension fund sent tens of millions to FTX with apparently no due diligence. That money ended up in the pockets of crypto insiders and also funded promotion like Super Bowl ads that sucked more retail dollars into FTX. Some of those poor FTX customers who are facing a 100% loss on their crypto “investment” may have been teachers from Ontario.

Pension funds and VCs don’t generally invest in gambling and drugs. Why do they invest in crypto?

I worked for a fund that lost a lot of money once. It was all legit, nothing shady, just dumb investments gone wrong.

We phoned one of these well known investors to tell them what had happened. By that of course I mean the person in charge of the little piece of the massive fund that was allocated to us.

On the call the guy goes "when I tell my boss in 5 minutes, I'm going to get fired for investing in you". He wasn't wrong.

The thing that shocks me is the due diligence. There's a heck of a lot of things you have to do to get Ontario to invest in your fund. All sorts of documents, double signature statements from banks, meetings where you wear a suit. We'd have lost the investments if we were playing video games, there's no doubt about that. Maybe culture changed but it seems really odd, because part of due diligence is qualitative: does this team seem like serious people?

It’s because the Sequoia investors and funds and VCs were applying a pattern that actually sort of works for software onto a financial services company.

If you’re building consumer facing software like a social network or app, and you have massive wild growth, you have a money printing machine in progress.

It’s pretty straightforward to get there with a seed of blind luck and some sweaty immature skilled tech guys from top schools who have literally no fucking idea how to actually run a company.

Everyone has seen that before. It works out. You invest the money they use it to hire people who know how to run a business and you win. You have no internal controls or systems for awhile and some accounts get nuked and there’s a breach or two and it doesn’t matter it’s a photo sharing website.

Then you apply that logic to healthcare or financial services and they make a Netflix mini series about just how much of a fucking moron yoi were for not understanding those are fundamentally different business models.

Because this is what FOMO looks like. Real FOMO. The kind where even people who are finance sharks end up looking at the wild hair and the unfiltered disrespect oozing out of bros like SBF, and figure there must be magic in those beans even if they don't quite get it and it doesn't quite add up. MAGIC. THE MOON. DIAMONDS. Can't fake those billions, or the blatant fuck-you signalling. Means the emperor is surely clothed. And a genius. The deep abasement and sloppy sucking sound coming from smart, distinguished people helps complete the picture.

Remember how the immaculately organized and professional appearing Wall St. firms did the exact same shit back in 2008? The only difference is really that they had the political clout to get a government bailout.

https://www.theonion.com/crypto-confidence-soars-after-ceo-d...

Which exact Wall St. firms took all their customer's deposits and bet them all on the Kentucky Horse Derby, while filling their balance sheets with their own equity, and self-printed scrip?

There's a lot that went wrong in 2008, but none of it looked anything like this.

MF Global

edit: And a ton of others, like every major investment bank (who also used customer funds as collateral for prop bets) except that the government bailed them out.

That's a fair point. The main difference between the two seems to be one of scope, and it's ridiculous that nobody at MF Global went to prison.

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