My opinion on this would've been different if they said "I am personally giving 50% of my money to charity in perpetuity..."
The other thing you should understand is that top VC firms such as AH (or YC) are not capital constrained. Dumping in twice as much money won't produce twice as much innovation or profits.
1. The best people are not going to join a firm that's giving away 50% of their management fees and carried interest income.
2. Not enough people & capital means
-Less investments, therefore more risks and less return.
-Less due diligence and monitoring of portfolio companies (again more risks)
-investors hate risk and low returns
That's true up to a point, but only up to a point. You hit the point of diminishing returns pretty early. I wish it were otherwise but there's 40+ years of history that support that theory.
It's not even that there aren't enough potentially great startups. It's that the venture business is a business that scales mostly with people. Each GP can credibly be a primary investor and board member in maybe 10-12 companies at a time. I don't think arbitrarily taking that number up to 20-24 would generate twice the returns, at least without the GP's head exploding in the process.
I agree which is why I brought up the topic of management fees and carry. You need them both to pay for additional people in order to scale your business. (which you addressed in your other comment).
True, but that's not what we're saying. We're saying that the GPs as individuals are going to do that, for the income we would have received in any event. This doesn't affect how the firm allocates fees and carry, and doesn't reduce the incentive for anyone to join the firm who would have joined before.
That is, of course, correct.
"We are delighted to announce that the six General Partners of Andreessen Horowitz, with our families, are all committing to donate at least half of all income from our venture capital careers to philanthropic causes during our lifetimes."
http://bhorowitz.com/2012/04/25/our-philanthropic-commitment...
I think it's an extremely positive statement for them to make.
The only way I can read your argument, is that the investment company should stop being generally profitable for the owners, and return more money to the investors. How does this make business sense? It would be like saying "Apple makes profit from selling iPhones, and just gives it away to shareholders. They should really bow to the customers and lower the costs and socialist bullshit to the shareholders". Unless of course Apple share holders are magical unicorns who deserve it, and the partners in a VC firm don't.
Re-read yesbabyyes comment. It makes no argument other than "who are you", "they are famous and accomplished" and "they are rich." It's a poor argument.
Not really. It's like Michael Phelp's 14 gold medals should carry no weight in a discussion of whether or not his butterfly stroke has room for improvement.
No one is arguing that Andreessan is not good at making money. If people were, then your analogy would be correct. People are arguing whether or not his money was put to efficient use in this specific instance (by donating to charity).
Having 14 gold medals does not prove to anyone that your butterfly stoke technique could not be better. Nor does earning a lot of money prove that you always make good decisions with money. Take my $100 toilet paper example. Earning a lot of money through good investments does not make using $100 for toilet paper suddenly unassailable to criticism. Does this make sense?
Having 14 gold medals means that though his butterfly stroke might or might not need improvement, a random punk on the internet doesn't have the authority to make a judgement call.
> Nor does earning a lot of money prove that you always make good decisions with money. Take my $100 toilet paper example. Earning a lot of money through good investments does not make using $100 for toilet paper suddenly unassailable to criticism. Does this make sense?
No it doesn't make sense. Your $100 for toilet paper example is pushing the boundaries of ridiculous which doesn't have anything to with the topic under discussion.
People who haven't earned through investment preaching people who have made a fortune about efficient use of money, money which happens to be their personal money, is just sad.
This criticism should be valid regardless of my identity and credentials?
>> Having 14 gold medals means that though his butterfly stroke might or might not need improvement, a random punk on the internet doesn't have the authority to make a judgement call.
>>> the "random punk" is probably a swimming coach ;)
That's the point. The defense should be valid whether or not the identity of the critic is known.
>>>>> "Michael Phelps sucks. He doesn't know shit about swimming." This criticism should be valid regardless of my identity and credentials?
>>>>>> That's not what I said. I said that the defense should be valid regardless of the identity of the critic.
I don't know what defense you are talking about, and who are these critics defending themselves from, and why are they talking about things they have no fucking idea about, and why do they think "I sometimes drown in my bathtub but my opinions on swimming are as valid as Phelps' because fuck, you can't appeal to authority Even PG agrees with me about appeal to authority being invalid."
All I am saying is:
Does winning 14 gold medals mean Phelps technique is perfect? NO
Does it mean a random punk on the internet can critic him? YES. Freedom of speech and stuff.
Will the opinion mean anything? FUCK NO.
Will it mean anything if the random punk happens to be a swimming coach? FUCK NO.
Will it mean anything if the random punk happens to be a former olympic champion or an olympic coach? IT MIGHT. There are no rules of thumb. Different things work for different people.
The critics are not doing the defending. Let me break it down for you.
jimmyvanhalen criticized Andreessen Horowitz use of money as being a relatively inefficient, compared to re-investing or lowering their fees. That was the criticism.
yesbabyyes defended with "you are a nobody in the investment world" and "you don't have as much money as Andreessen Horowitz, so you don't know what you're talking about." That was the defense.
The defense to the criticism is invalid because (aside from other logical fallacies), it hinges solely on the identity of the critic (jimmyvanhalen) and his personal accomplishments, relative to the entity being criticized (Andreessen Horowitz).
A defense with substance, one that works regardless of identity or accomplishments, would have been an argument as to why donating all the money to charity is helping people more people than re-investing.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evide...
If a wealthy self-made person says something about how to make money, that's stronger Bayesian evidence for that actually being a good way to make money then if some random person says it.
It may not make it better, but I think I did it because jimmyvanhalen's argument was, to me, so... Preposterous. As I understand him, he is basically arguing that if you feel that you have money to give to charity, you should give that to whomever gave you that money. I wonder what he feels about my, admittedly ridiculously small, donations to charity. Am I, too, wrong to give? Should I lower my fees and "give" that money to my clients instead?
I just wanted to add that I actually think wealth and investment accomplishments are somewhat relevant in this discussion, regarding your comment on fallacies. Especially given jimmyvanhalen's very strong opinions on what "a VCs job" is, what a16z "should" do, and his confused ending statement on that what they did would be fine by him if they did... Exactly what they are doing.
Don't you agree?
I don't really have an opinion on the actual thing being discussed though, other than my comments back and forth with "paul"
I.e., trolling. Yeah, I know.