Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex–and Maybe You Should Too (2022)

https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/

by lalaland1125 • 3 years ago

69 74 3 years ago

web.archive.org

tapeloop2• 3 years ago

Oofty. This aged well

tapeloop2• 3 years ago

"He was giving away 50 percent of his income to his preferred charities, with the biggest donations going to the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours. Both charities focus on building the earn-to-give idea into a movement."

Yeah, that's not actually helping anyone.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

Do you mean those charities aren’t helping anyone? Or do you mean earning to give isn’t helping anyone?

muldvarp• 3 years ago

Giving to "effective altruism" organizations as part of their effective "altruism" is so funny. Empowering "effective altruism" organizations because they think it's the most altruistic thing to do perfectly mirrors their fears of AI seeking world domination to produce more paper clips.

bambax5• 3 years ago

It seems Michael Lewis still maintains to this day that SBF's engagement with EA was sincere. Also his parents like to pretend they are do-gooders, advancing good political causes, helping the poor with taxes and whatnot.

But if any of this was true, the three of them could very easily have donated the millions they spent in his defense, and will probably keep on spending for an appeal. Not that it would have made much of a difference.

Yet in this soft family profile in The New Yorker[0] we find this:

When I asked what his son’s defense would cost, Bankman said, “Substantially everything we have.” But, he added, sounding melancholic, “that’s what money is for.”

Really? Money is for trying to keep fraudsters out of jail? I thought money was for making the world a better place. My bad.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/inside-sam-ban...

kwertyoowiyop• 3 years ago

We can file this with all the other cringe hagiography profiles of internet “geniuses” written for the last 30 years.

monero-xmr• 3 years ago

This has got to be the all-time best. The visualization of VCs noticing SBF is playing video games during an investment pitch, and the VCs LOVING IT, must be a manifestation of the same impulses that make CEOs hire dominatrixes to abuse them.

thinkingemote• 3 years ago

My favourite silly conspiracy theory was that SBF was not playing the game but just using the in game chat function when in the meetings to communicate with advisors and consultants. "What should I say now, they said I need to produce a turn sheet? What's that?"

Part of the theory goes that the chat is kind of untraceable and not logged (and not stuff that LEO could find). It's a reasonably common trope found in modern spy shows.

xyzwave• 3 years ago

This resembling that scene from The Social Network in which Zuckerberg rolls in to a meeting (with Sequoia) late, in pajamas, and tells the VCs to get bent is pretty ironic.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jynTRc8vcIA

rchaud3• 3 years ago

I imagine they thought they were witnessing a moment of myth-making, like seeing a certain social media iconoclast blowing away the VC stiffs in 2004 by walking in wearing a hoodie.

timeon2• 3 years ago

30 under 30

psunavy032• 3 years ago

30 doing 30-to-life . . .

objektif• 3 years ago

Do not just simplify this as any profile. This coming from the bestest ultimate VC who supposedly are able to predict future.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

It's an undeniable historical fact that some of the shadiest, most corrupt individuals in history used the appearance of beneficent motivations and altruistic ideals to more easily get away with all kinds of criminal behavior. Some describe this personality type as 'Covert Narcissist'.

dboreham• 3 years ago

Jimmy Saville (non UK readers will need to Google).

bambax5• 3 years ago

Yes! He was building hospitals and helping children "achieve their dreams".

And he was also molesting them, but that was only established after his death. He got to live the life of a rich, admired and excentric benefactor. Future king Charles was a big fan.

There's a good documentary about his life on Netflix.

erulabs• 3 years ago

It's also sometimes called the "savior complex" or the "exceptional man myth".

The idea is that some of us are so superior, morality doesn't apply to them. They can see the "greater good", so it's okay to stamp on "common" morality. I'm guessing SBF never got around to dostoyevsky at MIT.

strikelaserclaw• 3 years ago

same ideology the nazis used.

elil17• 3 years ago

He was very bad at picking donations in my opinion - hundreds of thousands to philosophers and Youtubers and essayists.

kawhah• 3 years ago

He was one of a few well-known EA whales which people in the community would panhandle from whenever they had an idea for a pet project which they could spin as 'high-impact'. Things like 'an $800,000 foundation to supply free Popsicles for everyone working on AI safety, whenever the temperature gets over 31 C'.

vasco2• 3 years ago

"Guerrilla PR"

deafpolygon• 3 years ago

Aged like milk.™

UniverseHacker3• 3 years ago

Pretty unfair to milk... you can buy ultra-pasteurized or shelf stable milk that lasts longer than the time between that article and the FTX collapse.

meepmorp• 3 years ago

It's kind of amazing that it only took a year to go from glowing hagiographies to criminal convictions on fraud charges.

gojomo4• 3 years ago

…and it was just 50 days from the September 22, 2022 publication date here to FTX's bankruptcy November 11, 2022!

teucris• 3 years ago

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.

Seriously? This is what gets VCs excited?

bag_boy• 3 years ago

That looks like political posturing on chat. They probably knew what was going to happen and wanted to be on team ‘yes’

mrDmrTmrJ• 3 years ago

What I think's fascinating about this quote is we've US VC back multiple attempts to create WeChat in the US. (Specifically an "Everything app + payments + chat + universal login.")

Both the Sequioa response to this pitch. And basically the same pitch/goal that Elon raised money on for the Twitter/X deal - and what he's trying to build.

I'm very curious to see if Apple/Meta rotate out of an attempt to have separate apps for different functions (e.g. Messenger separate from Facebook, or Apple Pay separate from iMessage) and rotate back toward building an integrated "SuperApp."

Certainly the "WeChat of the US" would be infinitely valuable.

kibwen2• 3 years ago

Apple already has this: it's called iOS. What do people think an app platform is?

gojomo4• 3 years ago

This is similar to Musk's vision for eX-Twitter, and something that WeChat & other apps have come closer to achieving in other markets.

bambax5• 3 years ago

This sounds a lot like the everything app of Musk. Or Paypal in 1999.

vidarh3• 3 years ago

Having been in the room during and after investment committee meetings at a much smaller VC, the thing to realise is that most VC's are inundated by founders who do not understand the economics of the VC business.

If you go in to a VC and tell them that you can likely do a $50m trade sale in 3 years time, you're telling them you're a waste of time, because odds are still that you will fail before that, and you're not betting on a big enough outcome that if you're successful their return will offset enough of the failures.

When I worked for a VC, if you weren't pitching 100m+ revenue within 5-10 years, it was a near instant no. Not because we believed you'd achieve that, because most likely you wouldn't just fail to achieve that but you'd be bankrupt before then. But because if you're not even setting your sights high enough, you're not even in the game, and we needed founders to set their sights high enough that the few companies who survive has a shot at high enough exits.

But most founders who pitch do not understand that. Their pitch decks are defensive, and full of worst case estimates. The VC's worst case is that you'll be bankrupt; the proportion of companies who survive and live on as "zombies" that eventually produce a low trade sale produce returns way too low to offset the bankruptcies - founders that aim that low are wasted opportunities for VCs.

That goes a long way to explain why they'd be excited about someone who is selling an idea of some crazy expansive plan: Whether or not they though it realistic, they were seeing someone unusual enough to dare voice a crazy level of ambition. He only really needed to convince them he'd try, and make them think that the potential returns outweighed whatever increased risk they saw.

After the umpteenth founder telling you how they're minimising risk and showing your forecasts of a worst case scenario that are irrelevant to the VC fund, I can see that being exciting.

I've lost count of the number of founders we had to explain to that while their defensive plans probably increased their chance of their company surviving, if you go for VC investment, being conservative and defensive is not going to convince anyone, or they'd be retail bankers instead. You're effectively pitching a guaranteed loss rather than a likely loss but a chance at a big prize. Even a totally crazy pitch where it looks like they're some chance at a big prize is going to be more exciting than a pitch where the founder is telling you how best case he'll still not earn you enough.

Of course the problem with this is that it also plays straight into the hands of delusional or crooked people willing to just make shit up to try to sell an idea they have no idea how to make work, and punishes a lot of otherwise brilliant founders who just don't understand what is expected by a VC.

paulddraper2• 3 years ago

VC is rocket fuel for rockets.

If you're not in the business of making rockets, you don't need rocket fuel.

moogly• 3 years ago

Zombo.com

lawgimenez• 3 years ago

“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.“

I don’t get the rationale behind this quote.

ashton314• 3 years ago

People who don't read books might think that all you need to know can be summarized into blog posts. Unfortunately this mentality will prevent you from the cure: reading a book about a big idea that would definitely not compress down into book form.

haskellandchill2• 3 years ago

he deserves jail just for that quote

vasco2• 3 years ago

It's something people that don't read books tell themselves. Same with the appearance of book-summary services or even speed reading.

The power of a book is how long you sit down thinking about the topics as much as the words on it. Anything that reduces the reading time will also reduce the thinking time which reduces the value.

Sure many modern books could've been shorter, specially the kind of pop-sci books most people read, but still I never heard this argument made by someone who's read any sensible number of books in their life. And if you're under, say 50-100 books, you haven't read enough for me to believe you understand how other people think.

daveguy• 3 years ago

This right here. When I read for recreation or work I read slowly. I like to take each sentence and paragraph in context of the whole piece. Sometimes I re-read sentences, paragraphs or pages when I think there is a significant enough idea there. I used to think I was a slow reader, but then I realized I am a careful reader. You definitely get a deeper understanding out of a piece of work when you read carefully than when you just process the words. I don't think it's possible to distill most books into a few paragraphs. It's as stark as the difference between knowing about something and living through something.

QuantumGood• 3 years ago

That's a solid heuristic, but commitment to studying can cause you to get a lot of book summaries.

vidarh3• 3 years ago

My guess is that we find the rationale behind that quote if we get a list of books he has read. My guess is that it is heavy on light self-help books, in which case he might just be right about that segment. Of course if that is the case then it also says something about him if his reaction is to dismiss reading and writing books rather than seeking out a broader selection.

wongarsu• 3 years ago

Particularly among self-help books, there are a lot of books that are about two pages of content, surrounded by 100 pages of pointless fluff and examples. People just aren't willing to pay for 5-page books, but if what you're saying is good enough they are willing to tolerate incredible amounts of filler and still rave about your book.

I guess that's what he's talking about, even if there are a lot of books where the length is more than justified.

pyrophane• 3 years ago

I mean, I've definitely read books where, after finishing them, I thought, 'if I'd read a one-page summary of this book instead, I don't think I would have gotten less out of it.'

But that isn't most of the books I've read.

To me, that quote just smacks of "I'm VERY SMART and have little to learn from others. Please summarize your ideas concisely so I may efficiently judge them."

JonathanMerklin• 3 years ago

I don't claim to be in SBF's head, but the gist of the rationale for this type of thought is a hypercritical focus on effective usage of the limiting resource of time. Learning facts about reality is the only reason to consume text content; any purposeful reduction of signal-to-noise ratio is folly. Books should be blogposts. Blogposts should be bulleted digests. Maximize information density to minimize wasted time. Fiction is pure waste.

I feel like most people who have ever had that mental model of reading evolve past that type of thinking and settle into the "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" mode of thinking by the time they reach high school (yours truly included). Not to mention one often needs to take a moment for newly acquired information to "settle", and language that's (loosely) bridgework between facts is what grants that moment.

timeon2• 3 years ago

hypercritical focus on effective usage of the limiting resource of time

Article states that he spent lot of his free time playing games. Maybe he is just lazy to parse information.

UniverseHacker3• 3 years ago

Let me translate it for you.

"I am very skeptical of depth. I don't want to say that nothing is complex enough to require time to explain or understand... but I've never taken the time to really understand anything and look how rich I am. The fact that I'm so rich proves that there is nothing below the surface, and anyone doing real work or research is just wasting their time and deluding themselves."

yowzadave• 3 years ago

The fact that Sequoia Capital thought this was a nice quote to feature in a puff piece tells you a lot about their deficiencies as human beings.

kibwen2• 3 years ago

Now consider that every other member of the venture-capital class is just as greedy, short-sighted, and idiotic as Sequoia.

paulddraper2• 3 years ago

Now redirects to https://www.sequoiacap.com/companies/ftx/

On September 22, 2022, we published a profile story on FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. The week of November 7th, we learned of the company’s liquidity crunch. On November 9th we sent a letter to our LPs with our updated outlook on FTX, and we removed our profile story on SBF the next morning.

haskellandchill2• 3 years ago

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!

wow, allow me to be vulgar for a moment, this s***s sam off so hard I'm getting a contact high

gemstones• 3 years ago

My favorite FTX fact is in the Going Infinite book, on the informal org chart drawn up by the psychiatrist to help him keep straight who worked with who.

There’s a biggish department of game devs that takes up almost the same amount of vertical space as the actual dev team of FTX. It’s the game studio behind Storybook Brawl. SBF purchased the studio because he liked the game, and it was rolled into FTX.

gojomo4• 3 years ago

This was such an instant, overwrought classic of the "journo falls in love with wunderkind subject" genre! It ran just ~7 weeks before the bankruptcy filing!

In retrospect, I have to wonder if the author, Adam Fisher, wasn't himself consciously choosing to play a credulous, campy character who's putty in the hands of his subject – uncritically cheerleading exactly what those who commissioned the work, Seqouia, wanted to read & advertise to others.

I kid you not that whenever a serious straight news outlet runs anything even one-quarter as flattering about someone, old journalist hands call the piece a "blowjob" – but often rationalize it as a "source-greaser": giving the subject positive coverage now, on-the-record, for juicy inside access, attributed or not, later.

Fisher's website (https://www.adamfisher.org/work/privatehistorian) describes himself thusly:

Adam is an acknowledged expert at the genre of literary non-fiction known to the trade as “oral history.” As a genre, oral history is closest to documentary film: It has the same kind of immediacy — the same punch — but with the heft and gravitas of a book. It’s a type of narrative that Adam fell in love with as a magazine editor because it hands the authorial voice to the subjects themselves, allowing them to — in effect — tell their own story. Adam continues to champion the genre, believing that stories are told best by the people who lived them. He has worked with both private individuals and corporations and is always eager to discuss new projects.

It's a provocatively interesting choice of style/perspective – and plausibly fair, as long as readers understand the impressionistic 'all criticism off' viewpoint.

As such, this "literary non-fiction" is probably best shunted towards 'glossy magazine' and PR-involvement-disclosed venues, like corporate or investor websites as here, rather than straight news pages. (Or, ghostwritten in name of subject. Or, bylined 'as told to'.)

And I wonder to what extent Michael Lewis, whose warm parroting of SBF's thinking in his recent 'Going Infinite' has drawn criticism, sees himself as practicing the same fuzzy oral genre. Lewis's defensiveness in interviews suggests not, but that might just be a crafty long-form "process journalism" performance: you report what you think gets-at-the-truth, eventually, including with the stories triggered by your initial half-truths, such as your own 'mea culpa' followups & corrections.

It might be entertaining to check out Fisher's 2018 book, "Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)", to see if it's got similar narrative plumage: https://www.adamfisher.org/work/author

rchaud3• 3 years ago

Michael Lewis is decades removed from the era of Liar's Poker. These days he is simply writing as a means to sell an eventual screenplay. I even saw him make a guest appearance on an episode of Billions.

tempsy• 3 years ago

The best thing that happened with the end of ZIRP is throwing cold water on VC as a profession

There is nothing particularly interesting or special about 99% of these people

gojomo4• 3 years ago

HN appears to be severly penalizing this submission compared to other less-upvoted submissions of similar age. Perhaps a duplicate-topic penalty, or `archive.org` domain penalty?

Given recent developments, it plausibly deserves a fresh look & discussion without display penalties.

rchaud3• 3 years ago

Throw this in on the funeral pyre of VC thought leadership propaganda. Next should be A16Z's Covid-era missive, hilariously titled "It's time to build".

https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/

Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex–and Maybe You Should Too (2022)

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