Don't talk about VCs | Hacker News Reader

Don't talk about VCs

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40 pointssmacktoward15 comments

May be tangential, but I've been reading Dave Winer off and on for several years, and I always have such a hard time figuring out why he feels so slighted? Either he suffers from a serious martyr complex, there's a grand conspiracy going around to hinder his greatness from blooming or I've simply never grown accustomed to his slightly boastful writing (seriously, the ratio of blog posts where he mentions he invented RSS should be the basis for a measure like the Winer Self-Aggrandizement Index or WSAI).

One of the unwritten rules of tech blogging is that you don't write about VCs. Or if you absolutely must, if it's unavoidable, it's always in glowing terms.

Do I live in some weird insulated pocket of the Internet, or is this a narrative Winer has just invented for himself to occupy? Or does "Tech blogger" have a different meaning to him?

I think his definition of "tech blogger" includes "...who wants VC investment in the future."

How many people have ever not gotten a VC investment because of the way they wrote about VCs? If the numbers make sense to them, VCs will invest. If anything, from how I understand it, VCs use social signals in exactly the opposite direction: people who are overly nice to them are not alphas.

Well, I don't think that the OP is advising people never to write "about VCs" so much as he's commenting on the groupthink and tendency to protect their own and remarking that, therefore, a person who exposes one bad apple will offend them all. I've heard of people having trouble raising money because they blew whistles on unethical VC practices from unrelated investors. The problem is that VCs all talk to each other and compare notes far beyond what any reasonable person would consider appropriate.

I'm using this comment to again dispute the idea that writing nice things about VCs will help you score a round, or that writing mean things about them will prevent you from doing that. They certainly do compare notes, but they're way more afraid of losing out on a good deal (remember: one good outcome pays for much of the portfolio) than they are interested in swinging their dicks.

They're comparing notes to see if the others in herd view the company as an alpha. Not to blackball people who write negative things about VCs in the abstract.

Job-seekers are always advised not to be negative about past employers. In other situations it is considered prudent to avoid this kind of talk, and I think it is strongly against norms of American business.

I am sure that most of the best classical artists had to watch their tongues around patrons.

So I'm interested to know: how is it really different with VCs?

The VC/company relationship is really not at all like an employer/employee relationship.

It would probably be very bad form and inadvisable to write something nasty about a VC you had worked with directly.

But otherwise, we're talking about what is by necessity a highly mercenary part of the market.

"The VC/company relationship is really not at all like an employer/employee relationship."

They can fire you, and you can't fire them. That means you are the employee, and they are the employer. If everything goes great, you'll never have to put that relationship to the test. But things don't always go great...

If you're an early stage company, the pre-revenue kind that we tend to think about when we talk about VCs on HN, the VC is buying a stake in 2-4 years of your output when they invest in you. Sure, they can "fire" you, in the sense that they often have the ability to vote you out of the company you founded, but this is usually a loss for them, not a win; they staked you, and you end up walking.

Anyways, the number of instances we can cite of a VC removing an officer of a company because they were discovered to have written mean things about VC in the abstract is... let me go out on a limb here...

The VC/company relationship is really not at all like an employer/employee relationship.

With VCs, the power dynamic is worse, because of the incestuous nature of that community.

Your boss can fire you, but if he tries to blacklist you or otherwise fuck up your future jobs, and you catch him, you will not only be able to sue him and win, but you'll embarrass him and he'll probably never manage again in that company, if not lose his job.

On the other hand, VCs talk to each other in all kinds of inappropriate and anti-competitive ways. They tend to look out for their own. So a VC can prevent you from raising money in the future if he wants to.

So, in fact, the power relationship can be a lot worse. It's true that VCs don't micromanage, but when things get ugly, they can be a lot more damaging than a regular boss.

I really don't like this blanket policy, because there are a lot of people doing bad things who deserve to be exposed.

I'm not saying people should be a dick about it. After all, most people will have at least one job or company not work out and, 9 times out of 10, the best thing to do is move on with the best terms possible. Most of these things are like a breakup, in that there isn't an issue of "bad people"; things just didn't work and the best thing for everyone is to let it go, to be good to each other if they have to interact in the future, and to avoid each other if not.

There are some cases that deserve to be blown, though. There was a startup in the 1990s that, when it was acquired, fired a few of its top performers (long story). If that's all it was, the smart thing for those people to do would be to move on, but it didn't end there. There was no severance, and the startup was forbidden, by a term in the acquisition contract, from giving any kind of reference. This was in biotech, which is more specialized and much smaller of a town. Without a reference these people were proper fucked.

When these sorts of things happen, the right thing to do is blow every whistle you can and bring the bad guys down, with the end goal being to expose and humiliate them so badly that no one ever tries to pull that again.

Virtually every great tech company was built with the help of VCs. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Yelp, etc.

The alternatives to these companies winning was not an open solution run by a co-op of hippies. The alternative was some shittier solution by Microsoft, MySpace, Yahoo, or even nothing at all.

It really might be nicer if The Search Engine (Google), The Message Broadcasting Platform (Twitter), The Social Platform (Facebook) were NOT run by private companies, with all their faults and biases. It would be better for the world if every person and company could build on them in a completely competitive and fair way. We would get better stuff.

It just doesn't seem to work out that way. Either people aren't motivated to do it or it's not possible. Whatever the case it's just not how things work (for now).

Given the way it does work VCs contribute in a very important way. Their effect seems to be purely additive. They don't prevent anyone from succeeding by alternative means.

Mitt Romney seems like a very different kind of VC than helped tech companies. He handled much later stage stuff (IIRC), making him more of an investment banker type.

> like the American workers who Romney's tactics cost their jobs and pensions

Wait, what??

I don't have any reason to like or dislike VCs on personal experience. The ones I've met randomly (e.g. running in Central Park) seem to be nice enough, and I'm sure that a lot of them are good. But VC-istan is full of deeply unethical people (those I have met, unfortunately) who don't deserve to be funded and I can't believe that the VCs aren't aware of what these people are doing. VCs need to stop funding unethical people, who get money just because they're well-connected, outright. Plus there are horrors like multiple liquidation preferences, which exist to reassert the social superiority of the VCs and leave me feeling it wouldn't be so bad if VC-Istan disappeared. Technology doesn't need it.

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