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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I think this mostly comes from the PayPal mafia sort of attitude: libertarian when it helps me, bail me out when it helps me, start a bank run when it helps me.

There was a time when tech did seem like a better business movement. Certainly better than the financial sectors, or heavy industry, or pharma. But then we let Thiel and Musk become the face, with Sachs and Calacsnais (or however you spell his name) become their media toadies, and we got fucked on the PR front.

We need to reject these guys a bit harder. Thiel's bank run was unnecessary. He should have picked up the phone and got the numbers from SVB instead of destroying an institution that's so helpful for small founders. Founders are now more dependent on Thiel and his ilk, and less independent.

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Yes, it seems that the antisocial defectors are going to win in the short term and may have more power in the long term. Any suggestions onto how to inject some discipline and long-term thinking into this?

I am not smart enough to have a full solution, but I think part of it must include some honest examination of all the players here, including the big ones whose mere opposition has a chance of crushing new founders. So a lot of that has to come from other established players in the space. Maybe being a little bit less eager to hop on to rounds led by these folks. Use soft power at a minimum.

But what do I know, I'm just a nobody in the space! Others who have more power, wealth, and wisdom will be able to handle this better. (And I should point out that I don't absolve SVB of their errors here either, it's just that I think their errors are more about miscommunication about a bad situation of their own doing that had a clear solution ).

Having more people with leftwing/progressive politics involved and less libertarians would help.

Money tends to make people into (faux) libertarians.

There aren't that many libertarians in tech compared to other areas, in my experience.

The difference is that some of the libertarians are very noisy about their politics, whereas most people in tech don't make that much public noise about politics.

When you combine that dynamic with The NY Times deciding that it has to denigrate tech as an industry and take it down a few pegs (a literal mandate from their editors!), the jerks gain prominence, and tech looks the worse for it. And I would say that the PayPal mafia's sins aren't so much being libertarian as just being awful people that are super easy to hate. For example, musk calling that one guy a pedo, or taking pleasure in firing people.

This assholery has now become synonymous with tech, but it is completely counter to my experiences in tech, but maybe I've just been lucky.

Here's another way:

> Silicon Valley law firms are now making lists of individuals who resigned from boards last week, because they didn’t want to get stuck with the liability, and VCs who catalyzed SVB’s bank run, so they can advise clients to never do business with those people/firms again

https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/163513968622949171...

> or however you spell his name

Sacks is spelled with a CK.

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