Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex

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

by anonu • 4 years ago

119 148 4 years ago

sequoiacap.com

draw_down• 4 years ago

God, all this shit is so embarrassing. The way VCs just absolutely idolized this guy is really something to see.

anshumankmr2• 4 years ago

This is 404ing. Do you have a copy?

Edit: Here's a Google Cached Copy https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33...

In case that is past its TTL, try this:https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...

quantumwannabe2• 4 years ago

Another archive: https://archive.ph/Yg64e

alpb• 4 years ago

Haha they replaced the page entirely with a paragraph saying:

Update: November 9, 2022 A liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.

anshumankmr2• 4 years ago

So are they walking back this statement? Not sure what they really achieved by deleting this puff piece. Everytime a puff piece is written and blows up spectacularly, it’s pretty much immortalized through the internet. The articles on Elizabeth Holmes come to mind or when someone declared M Night Shyamalan as the next Spielberg.

adolph2• 4 years ago

A key awesome bit noted elsewhere:

“Embarrassingly, we had never tried to reach out to Sam, because we figured he didn’t need us,” Bailhe admits. “I thought they were just minting money and had absolutely no need for investors.” Learning otherwise, they quickly contacted SBF and organized a last-minute Zoom call between him and the partners at Sequoia—at four California time on a hot July Friday afternoon.

[...]

The Zoom went well for all concerned. SBF looked relaxed as he answered questions, talking, as he usually does, in complete paragraphs about topics of extreme complexity. Ramnik Arora, FTX’s head of product and another ex-Facebook engineer, remembers the meeting clearly: “We’re getting all these questions from Sequoia toward the end. He’s absolutely fantastic.”

[...]

That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”

Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. “YES!!!” exclaimed a third.

[...]

“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that f....r was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”

NickC256• 4 years ago

That's terrifying. Guy is just casually spouting bullshit while playing LoL, and one of the top VCs are just tripping over themselves to throw money at him.

i can only hope the actual due diligence at top VCs is much, much more robust and deep than this. If this isn't an extreme outlier and is more the norm than I realized, well, I had way too high hopes for the so-called gatekeepers of the top echelons of society.

markisus• 4 years ago

But, at Jane, SBF osmosed another trading principle. He learned to be “risk-neutral”: In simple terms, a trader, given a choice between $50 and a 50 percent chance at $100, must be agnostic if they want to maximize the expected value of earnings over a lifetime.

Huh? Over a lifetime, both bets have the same expected value. Is there a mathematical explanation why the more risky one is better?

xiphias22• 4 years ago

Actually Sam hopefully understands Kelly criterion in which people optimize for log(EV), in which case here not wagering is the Kelly optimum.

ravenhappy• 4 years ago

From the article: "Just do the math: At $2,000 per life, a million dollars could save 500 people, a billion could save half a million, and, by extension, a trillion could theoretically save half a billion humans from a miserable death."

The math...

robocat4• 4 years ago

And a pastebin of the text: https://controlc.com/3af6a40f

gennarro• 4 years ago

Interesting update yesterday:

>UPDATE: Nov 9, 2022: Since this article was published, a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.

xiphias22• 4 years ago

Of course investors want to come before customers in real life, I'm sure there are backdoor deals going on about which ,,customer'' to pick.

seibelj• 4 years ago

This interview has morphed into my own personal economics seminar, and Professor Bankman-Fried is my tutor. He’s as good at explaining the principles of macroeconomics as anyone out there in the world today—and I know this for a fact because I’ve subsequently watched YouTube’s best on the same subject. But SBF teaches me Macro while simultaneously playing round after round of Storybook Brawl.
Still, I’ve got my answer. And it turns out that I’ve aimed too low. A trillion isn’t enough money to fix the world’s problems, so SBF won’t stop at merely a trillion. It’s an answer that begs the next question, which SBF, ever helpful, has already anticipated: “So, is five trillion all you could ever use to help the world?”
SBF is now interviewing himself. He slows down for a moment, and I assume that’s because of the cognitive load of doing three things at once. He’s asking good questions (my job); he’s formulating answers (his job); and he’s playing Storybook Brawl (no one’s job). But then I hear the tap-tap-tapping from his fingers start to accelerate, and I realize he’s not slowing down under the load at all. Just the opposite, in fact: This guy is in the Storybook Brawl equivalent of a gank!

This entire profile is incredible. SBF is one of the greatest conmen of all time, the absolute gall to testify in Congress, pal around with celebs, buy the naming rights to the Miami Heat stadium, claim he is "the most transparent", all built on a total scam of stealing billions.

If this guy doesn't go to jail why do we even have jails?

TechBro86153• 4 years ago

Does anyone from his class at MIT know this guy? Was he involved in the Bitcoin community there? Where did he come from? How did he go from Jane Street intern to $25 million per day arbitrage?

strikelaserclaw2• 4 years ago

my guy comes from the "elite", both his parents are stanford professors, i'm sure a smart guy like him can raise money.

TechBro86153• 4 years ago

Ah yes, the mysterious elite and their impenetrable opaque social circles that spawn wunderkind out of thin air...

googlryas2• 4 years ago

Tons of smart people born to elite professors and almost zero percent of them end up billionaires(notionally at least).

dfghbbjiiugb• 4 years ago

Yes, people know him. He's a math-y guy (and seemed like a reasonably nice and genuine person). He wasn't just a Jane Street intern, he worked there for a few years full time before striking out on his own. Doesn't seem so hard to explain to me--smart dude with some experience in finance et viola.

googlryas2• 4 years ago

Was he particularly successful at Jane street? As an example of someone with a solidified track record, Bezos was at DE Shaw for only 4 years as well and he is to this day still the youngest senior VP(28 years old) ever after only 2 years there.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

The traders at my firm knew him for Alameda. Straight quote: "It's crazy to think a couple of years ago we were just chatting with this dude and he seemed like a normal guy and now he's got billions of dollars. Guy timed it hella right."

AFAIK he seemed a decent fellow (but that's 2nd hand) and about par for the trading space. But that was then. Obviously now in hindsight, he seems to have been different in some intangible ways.

skippyboxedhero• 4 years ago

The story about SBF playing LoL whilst Sequoia partners are fawning over him couldn't look worse for them.

I also notice that they don't say what proportion of gains FTX was...given that it was $150 into a few billion, it is fair to assume that it was a substantial proportion (and...tbh...that reads as deceptive).

Ofc, they won't die, you have to pay the toll of fees for these guys because they have the whole VC network locked up (to some extent, Sequoia has fallen away a bit more recently). But these funds are just pure beta.

exogeny• 4 years ago

I have a few friends who knew him (and Caroline) at Jane Street; their recollections are nothing like this garbage puff piece.

Sequoia should be beyond embarrassed. Yes, their fund is way up. But they did next to zero actual diligence here, and acted like complete fools (and bragged about it!) during the pitch process. Perhaps even worse, they were apparently fine with their investment conveying zero governance, zero board seats and zero information rights.

eachro• 4 years ago

what are their recollections like?

40acres• 4 years ago

How embarrassing - VC over the past decade has simply been folks riding market beta, zirp and piggybacking on their friends deals. Maybe this market crunch will weed out the bad bunch but I’m not holding my breath.

twblalock• 4 years ago

VC didn't change. Their job is not to be judicious about investment. Their job is to invest in everything that might pay off, knowing that much of it will fail but even a single big win like finding the next Amazon will outweigh all the losses on the other investments.

bmitc5• 4 years ago

I don’t understand the title’s relevance to what is posted/linked.

What is an LP, mentioned in the update?

newfonewhodis• 4 years ago

Sequoia deleted the original post. Here's the cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33...

williamstein• 4 years ago

With choice quotes such as “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.”

bmitc5• 4 years ago

Thank you. What's weird is that they describe Jane Street as an "under the radar" shop, which it isn't. and also a high-frequency trading shop, which it also isn't to my understanding.

phphphphp• 4 years ago

Sequoia have removed the article because of how embarrassing it is in hindsight (and at the time but I guess at the time their embarrassment threshold wasn't reached). The title references the article. You can find a copy linked in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549307

pjc50• 4 years ago

"Limited partner". Oddly as Sequoia aren't structured as a partnership, they appear to be a regular LLC. I guess you can just read "investor".

propter_hoc2• 4 years ago

Sequoia is structured as an LLC, but they, or an affiliated "GP Co" still act as the general partner of their funds (which are limited partnerships).

Here's a couple diagrams of typical VC fund structures:

1. https://www.asimplemodel.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Priv...

2. https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*XPPTuER9ZGAoXSMe544ZUw.pn...

defen2• 4 years ago

Limited Partner, the people (funds) who give VCs money to invest. If you read the cached version of the content that was previously on the page (someone linked it in the comments) it's kind of maximally embarrassing for them, and really puts to rest any notion that elite VCs are smarter or better than the rest of us.

bmitc5• 4 years ago

Thanks!

really puts to rest any notion that elite VCs are smarter or better than the rest of us.

Oh, I was under no other impression. Most of these VCs got lucky in the dot com bubble days and other such scenarios. They certainly are not oracles.

robocat4• 4 years ago

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/limited-partner.asp

The important bits: “A limited partner's loss from the company's operations may not exceed the amount of the individual's investment.” and “Limited partnerships are pass-through or flow-through entities. That means that all partners are responsible for taxes on their share of the partnership income, rather than the partnership itself.”.

NickC256• 4 years ago

What I don't get is why some of these guys just cash out when they're near the top.

Guy was 29 and had some 20+ billion dollars to his name (supposedly). Leave the trading firm to a few folks, keep a bit of equity to enjoy the continued success, and that's it! Just walk away, call it a day and enjoy your life. Same could be said for Zuck - except he had like 25 or 30 billion (not adjusted for inflation) at the same age. I just don't understand it.

NINJA EDIT: changed the amount of money he was apparently worth. Wiki said it got to 28 billion.

jjulius• 4 years ago

Greed, power, narcissism, the list goes on. Not attributing any one of those specifically to any individual, but yeah.

herodoturtle• 4 years ago

Or ambition.

NotYourLawyer• 4 years ago

Poor man wants to be rich. Rich man wants to be king.

ren_engineer• 4 years ago

dude was running a Ponzi scheme in this case, there was no walking away. There were like 3 people internally who knew about all this stuff behind the scenes. It was a full time job keeping everything hidden for this long

the-printer2• 4 years ago

This is it in a nutshell. Maybe when a criminal enterprise is more “white-collar” than the usual, the truth behind the concept of being “in too deep” is overlooked.

pfortuny• 4 years ago

The will to power. It is a much stronger force than one reckons usually. And it is very difficult to be conscious of it in oneself.

tempsy2• 4 years ago

His reported net worth was equity in his business.

The idea of "cashing out" the entirety of your equity in a VC backed co as a founder is not exactly an option unless you're acquired.

NickC256• 4 years ago

I get that - but my hunch is that if VC firms were able to invest the amount that they did, he probably had the ability to sell more of his stake in the company if he wanted to.

Granted, with what we know now, that does fit the definition of securities fraud.

bluedevil2k• 4 years ago

We’re all missing the big gotcha here - if he tried to sell out, the buyer would have done some DD and found the fraud as quick as Binance did. Best to keep quiet about your crimes.

CPLX• 4 years ago

You can’t walk away from a fraudulent balance sheet.

skulk• 4 years ago

Why don't you quit your (assumed comfy US tech) job and go retire in a low cost-of-living area? I know that it's not the same thing, but the answer might be similar.

geraldcombs• 4 years ago

I think you just answered the question yourself. There's a big difference between being able to retire to a low cost of living area and being able to retire to an any cost of living area.

NickC256• 4 years ago

I don't have a comfy US tech job, and never have, but I would love to. Closest I got was doing PM work for a startup in which I had significant equity (but ended up failing). Funny enough, YC doesn't even let me attend their job webinars!

Truth is though - if I could ever achieve a payout of a few million or more, I'd call it a day, right on the fucking spot. Invest in long stocks and dividend stocks, and go live in a small home near a cold weather city. I grew up around billionaires, and they scare the shit out of me...no intention of becoming one.

anonporridge7• 4 years ago

Why did Yvon Chouinard not actually give his company Patagonia to charity, but instead gave it to a non profit foundation that he and his family still totally control?

Up to a certain point, more money doesn't make your life materially better.

At that point, the game becomes entirely about power and influence.

caminante4• 4 years ago

I debated the Patagonia altruist marketing play with friends.

The consensus was that if you were the kids, you'd much rather have the post-tax cash in your bank account. :-)

vasco3• 4 years ago

You do realise he could've just not done anything if that was the point? Why go through all the trouble if he could've just kept the company?

Some people will find problems with everything, what a depressing comment. I guess he also runs it as a B-Corp and wrote a book promoting the concept because he wants more power, there's no way he actually wants the employees to have more balanced lives and to put less impact on the planet, it's just a ploy to get more power.

You're the type of person that hears a friend donated money to charity and mutters to themselves that they just did it for attention and recognition.

msie• 4 years ago

There is the possibility that the charity would run the company into the ground.

jt2190• 4 years ago

Having a company that is a hybrid of a designer/manufacturer and a charity makes for a confusing corporate mission. Better to let the company focus operating profitably and let the charity focus on evaluating grant applications and funding projects.

The trust is there to oversee the company (as its major shareholder) and to make sure that it is held accountable. They in in turn fund the charity and hold them accountable as well.

nostromo• 4 years ago

I think it’s selection bias, because plenty of folks do cash out early.

If Zuck had taken Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook for $1B, neither you nor I would be talking about Facebook or Zuck at all right now.

The only people that get to these insane levels of wealth are people who repeatedly let their bets ride, perhaps due to innately low risk aversion.

misiti37804• 4 years ago

if 330M people flip a coin 20 times in a row, someone will get close to 20 heads. that person might have been zuck. how much is talent and how much is luck, no one will even know.

matthewmacleod• 4 years ago

If Zuck had taken Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook for $1B, neither you nor I would be talking about Facebook or Zuck at all right now.

I think that's kind of the point – I can't imagine myself being offered the choice of "enough money to do whatever you want forever" or "enough money to do whatever you want forever but also constant public attention" and choosing the latter.

factsarelolz3• 4 years ago

If Zuck had taken Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook for $1B

The US government will never allow Zuck to sell LifeLog

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

berberous• 4 years ago

Forget innately low risk aversion, Sam has autistically low levels of risk aversion:

https://twitter.com/sammykoppelman/status/159047684524111462...

bagels• 4 years ago

I think about Tom from myspace all the time. He's not a billionaire, but he cashed out for tens of millions and is living the best life.

myth_drannon• 4 years ago

Bernie Madoff also didn't quit at the peak.

pastor_bob• 4 years ago

Many people cash out at stages before this and don't make it to his level. You don't hear about them because they cashed out. Above a certain number, it's really irrelevant. The drive (or greed, etc) keeps them going.

Not to mention, money makes your influence increase, and the idea you can start influencing things like politics on a national scale becomes very enticing.

alangibson• 4 years ago

The qualities that get them to that point are the same qualities that make it impossible for them to stop.

TuringNYC• 4 years ago

> What I don't get is why some of these guys just cash out when they're near the top.

Because you dont know where the "top" is. One could argue the top was 1M. 5M. 100M. 1B.

NickC256• 4 years ago

Right - I get that, and you make a fair (and valid!) point. Nobody knows where the top is. It's all hypothetical.

But my point is that when you're seeing hypergrowth in your company, you probably have an idea of what it's worth or what level you're happy walking away at. Example: I currently run a small side-hustle culinary business while I look for a full-time tech gig. It doesn't make me much money but I enjoy doing it and it helps put food on the table. If someone came up and offered me a million dollars to walk away, I'd take it without blinking.

If Yahoo offered Zuck 10 billion way back when instead of 1 billion, I have a feeling he would have walked away, too.

shuckles• 4 years ago

Did you read the article? He didn't cash out for the same reason he left a job with guaranteed wealth at Jane Street: he doesn't think he has the same diminishing marginal utility for money that you do.

vagab0nd• 4 years ago

When I think about it rationally, the answers are pretty obvious to me. Either he wanted something other than money (winning, fame, etc.), or he was addicted and wanted more money.

I don't have billions of dollars, but if I was put in that position, I could imagine myself doing the same, maybe. (not the fraud part, but continue working)

jonas21• 4 years ago

Just walk away, call it a day and enjoy your life.

Presumably, they're already doing the thing they enjoy most in life. Cashing out and lying around on a beach or whatever would be extremely disappointing.

skrebbel• 4 years ago

I don’t know about SBF, who to my limited understanding is just a run of the mill crypto scammer so should’ve gotten out while he was ahead, but with Zuck I’m pretty sure that it’s simply not only about the money for him, but also about making cool stuff and having an impact.

HFguy• 4 years ago

My view, having watched some super wealthy guys up close, is the formula to make a lot of money in one life time is: (1) Be skillful at whatever you do + (2) Take a lot of risk

Keep in mind there is a survivorship bias at work.

So the really rich guys, they usually do have considerable skill and ability. But they also have taken big risk after big risk and it has, more or less, always paid off for them.

It is all they know...the coin flips going their way. So they are some combo of they are pre-wired to take big risks and/or have been conditioned by experience that the risks just always pay off for them.

So they will just keep taking big risks time after time. There is no "take the money off the table".

The question I always have is it more (A) pre-wired or (B) Good luck has conditioned them over and over. Don't know.

As you point out, you see not just SBF doing this, but Zuck and Elon and the list goes on...

tsimionescu• 4 years ago

You forgot the most successful strategy for making enormous amounts of money in one life: start with enormous amounts of money, and don't be entirely completely idiotically incompetent. Making a billion dollars is a lot easier if you can start with mommy's billion, or even her hundred million.

nullc• 4 years ago

(supposedly)

Key word.

But not it looks like most of that wealth was fictional-- just marking up highly illiquid premined shitcoins.

donsupreme• 4 years ago

$20B with asset. How much of that asset he holds that he can cash out without systemic correction, maybe $1B? Especially with a lot of his worth tied to his own token FTT, which has paper thin liquidity.

keewee7• 4 years ago

He was born on the Stanford campus to parents who are Stanford professors. His personal criteria for success is probably something else than just becoming yet another rich tech guy.

vkou• 4 years ago

It was also certainly not becoming the Madoff of crypto.

fshbbdssbbgdd• 4 years ago

SBF wealth probably would have vaporized if he tried to sell.

In recent days there’s been evidence that a big portion of SBF’s net worth was tied up in coins SBF issued. To the extent that his companies possessed other assets, many of them were purchased with loans collateralized by SBF coins.

We just saw what happened when confidence in FTX was threatened. The whole thing came tumbling down. Selling out would likely have had the same outcome.

readthenotes1• 4 years ago

Well, what we saw was the guy stealing $8B to keep the plates spinning. Hope he goes to jail.

escapecharacter• 4 years ago

Maybe I’m in the wrong tax bracket but I’m fine walking away from anything once I have more than a billion dollars regardless of age.

chrchang5232• 4 years ago

In SBF’s case, I think there was actually an academic failure: there was something very important that he should have been taught, but wasn’t.

https://mobile.twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/133725070407583334...

https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1299553547596431360

These are excellent topics for classroom discussion. What I believe should have followed is a stronger justification for using something like the Kelly criterion despite a personal near-linear utility function, on the basis that e.g. not going all the way down to zero asymmetrically preserves access to future investment opportunities, and similar grounds. I think plenty of people intuitively understand this.

But instead, nobody was able to explain to him why he couldn’t throw out the book on risk management, and he acted accordingly.

robocat4• 4 years ago

SBF discusses his objections to the assumptions for the Kelly Criterion here: https://twitter.com/sbf_ftx/status/1334310313710157829

  1) it's way too conservative for many people
  2) it contains strong assumptions about infinitely repeated identical bets that you can't have an adaptive strategy with, none of which describe the real world
  3) it's scale-invariant in a way that is inconsistent with its sublinearity

“Rationalisation” is a favourite word of mine, because it is so irrational. I try not to underestimate anyones capacity for self-deception (including my own). Sam surely deeply understood the Kelly Criterion, and risk management, yet he apparently kept doubling down, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox

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

  Here, SBF realized, was the rub: When he applied this principle to his own life, he came up short. There was little chance he’d get himself fired from Jane Street. Thus the decision to stick with Jane was a risk-averse preference. It was the logical equivalent of being offered a choice between $50 and 50 percent of $100, and saying, “Give me President Grant.” SBF was risk-neutral on behalf of Jane Street, but not, he realized, for his own life. To be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor, he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk-neutral career path—which, if we strip away the trader-jargon, actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math couldn’t be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth trumps low risk multiplied by mere rich-guy wealth. 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.

Although it is weird the author of the article uses an example of taking both bets, yet Sam throws away one bet (working for Jane Street).

Asides on Effective Altruism investing: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9pktesiW2WPEFNvCQ/... https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CsSdjZF7wyNuMvSdy/...

hnfong• 4 years ago

As another poster mentions, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33550610 , he's aware of the St. Peterburg's paradox. There's no way a rational person can understand the paradox and continue to disregard Kelly's criterion.

anonu• 4 years ago

He needed Elon money. Elon questioned his wealth and SBF was looking to add a few zeros. Pure Greed.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

Because the guy who would quit there would quit earlier.

ptero• 4 years ago

I feel the same way. He probably could not have sold a large portion of it without trashing its value, but he surely could have sold a few hundred millions.

And, should the system later implode, he could have easily disassociated himself from this fiasco: "those things would not have happened if I were still running things; I lost a lot of billions; I am a victim of this fiasco, just like you are."

In politics, too, very few leaders manage to leave at the right time: while they are near the peak of success, which looks so much better later on...

bmitc5• 4 years ago

I have always wondered the same. Others say it’s selection bias, but I think it’s more of the personality type of those that don’t cash out. I think there’s a lot of narcissism, ego, or maybe even just plain naivety involved.

If it was me, I would cash out and then do some combination of foundation/volunteering work, education, relaxing, and focusing on some of my actual passions.

Ebree• 4 years ago

I believe that founder leaving created a big missing out fear in founder and lowers value of shares automatically. When get all from first business it becomes part of you and your identity. You start asking yourself if you are able to come back to the same point with a different idea, if you will make any good at different path and if you not miss out on ability to forever improve product "only you know best in world". Nobody wants to resign from position of best in the world at something & it highjacks you mentally.

The most based thing to do would be leaving company, cashing out and building a better alternative.

But nobody that crazy except few guys like Nodejs, Whatsup guys(if not mistaken), lately Jack. But sometimes it's forced by circumstances like founder(s) of vk & Telegram. And you have these serial pump and leave schemes builders as the guy who built Bitshares, Steen, EOS. It maybe shows that only keeping distance to own creation you keep ability to see it critically, notice flaws & point where you can't improve it without fundamentally redesigning it from scratch. People are servants of their goal, if they can't imagine better extension or replacement of the goal they get stuck because only alternative is not having a good goal & being lost. People are scared if being lost more that of death. Maybe both cases are somehow similar.

propter_hoc2• 4 years ago

Oh god they took it down! I tried to read this yesterday - it was truly nauseating.

saadatq• 4 years ago

Can’t wait for the HBO special on SBF.

My money is on Jonah Hill to play SBF.

bogomipz2• 4 years ago

Why has the title been editorialized? Also why is the date September 2022 in the post's title when the linked post's most prominent detail is "Update: November 9, 2022"?

eat_veggies• 4 years ago

The logical conclusion is that the title hasn't been editorialized, and the date is accurate, but Sequoia have took down the post because it's an embarrassment for them.

Here's an archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...

bogomipz2• 4 years ago

Oh wow. Yes that makes perfect sense. Thanks

deck4rd• 4 years ago

That link now 301s to another page. Here is an archive of the article: https://archive.ph/Yg64e

drewmate• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/Yg64e

mediaman• 4 years ago

Many of these VCs seem to just be grifting into whatever market they can get the most potential capital gains from the 'greater fool theory.' In other words, they don't care what value it generates; they care if there's a good opportunity to cash out capital gains by conning other people to pay much more than what they paid.

A while ago, the Freakonomics podcast interviewed Arianna Simpson, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and who manages some of their crypto investments. The host, Stephen Dubner, asked what is now the classic question of 'what problem does crypto solve?' A question you'd expect a crypto investor to easily anticipate.

Her main response -- and I promise I'm not joking here -- was that you could resell access to your home wifi with crypto tokens, mainly to your neighbors.

When pressed further for a more commercially credible response, she engaged in a remarkable attempt to appeal to authority, saying that "if you were in the meetings I'm in...with top founders, from the top schools...you wouldn't be questioning this." But without any further explanations.

From what I could tell, Arianna frankly didn't care about any utility it could provide. If it did provide some, she couldn't name it. But she recognized a grift, and knew she could likely make some money using other peoples' money to get in on it.

To be fair, Andreessen is not an investor in FTX, though they've lost plenty of LPs money in other crypto investments. But this attitude is reflective of the approach of many VCs, including those at Sequoia.

They don't care about the product, or the value created. What they care about is that there's this masterful story-teller with wild hair, that the press will adore, and with an addressable market that seems unconstrained, which is easiest to do when it is undefined. These stories can be flipped for a hundred or a thousand times their original investment not because they generate that much value but because there is a frenzy of momentum and fear of losing out.

And often this works: the market frenzy begins to crest, and they can sell into it. But eventually the wave does crest and crashes down, and they are caught in it. And in the aftermath we look at the enablers, the funders, and their logic looks preposterous, because we assume they care about building lasting value. And we wonder what exactly it is they do, what their purpose is, what value they leave behind.

lvl102• 4 years ago

I find it hilarious that he’s lying about overlooking basic accounting. I call bullshit and even if it were gross negligence, he should serve time in jail.

What he and Do Kwon did is far more egregious than Madoff. And perhaps even Theranos’ Holmes. We are living through the Golden Age of Digital Frauds.

neonate• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/Yg64e

2-718-281-828• 4 years ago

Could someone please ELI5 for me what this is about? How does the linked page justify the HN headline?

Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex

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