Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are now VCs

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/04/27/meet-silicon-valleys-newest-vcs-tyler-and-cameron-winklevoss-video/

by dwynings • 14 years ago

48 45 14 years ago

thenextweb.com

draggnar• 14 years ago

that was painful

mtgentry• 14 years ago

Tyler Winklevoss: "We were there at the beginning of web 2.0.."

Yes, technically you were both alive on earth at the time. So was my Nana, my creepy uncle Hank, and about 6 billion other people.

rollypolly• 14 years ago

Would working for the Winklevoss'es be a black mark on someone's resume?

For one thing, you'd never get hired at Facebook after that. Then again, Facebook isn't the only game in town.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

Facebook have people in many places, though. There's a Facebook mafia as there is a PayPal mafia.

fuzzythinker• 14 years ago

Mark officially worked for them before ;)

jonnathanson• 14 years ago

Honestly, I doubt they occupy more than a passing thought in Mark Zuckerberg's, or Facebook's, minds these days.

tdfx• 14 years ago

"Operational experience" == "litigation experience"?

untitledwiz• 14 years ago

I LOL-ed really hard when they claimed they had relevant/useful "operational experience".

maaku• 14 years ago

I don't know about you, but I remember ConnectU.com being an actual, usable website. Not that it at any point gained traction over Facebook, but they did at least execute the idea.

adaml_6232• 14 years ago

So since I have only watched the Social Network I'm very uninformed about the Winklevoss brothers and facebook. Can someone throw up some links to give me some more datapoints on the issue. From my point of view they are the same as normal VCs

mkramlich• 14 years ago

I didn't downvote you but I wanted to respectfully point out that your question could have been more easily answered by taking a moment to Google about the Winklevoss brothers and the Social Network, rather than post your comment here. That kind of thing is all just a few clicks away at any time, on the web.

adaml_6232• 14 years ago

Thanks for the reply, I was wondering why my HN points had dropped. I think my original post should have read, "The Winklevoss brothers seem to be fairly normal VCs with a short track record of backing good ideas. Why are people _here_ on HN dismissive of them." Live and learn I guess.

T_S_• 14 years ago

Sure, just check their Facebook pages.

joshmlewis• 14 years ago

I guess one good thing that came out of the Social Network is that they will never live down their parts in the movie. Especially being portrayed as "bad guys." Just the start of the interview the first 30 seconds must have been very awkward for them.

c250d07• 14 years ago

I only saw it once a while ago, but I don't think they were portrayed as 'bad guys' in the film. They even came out in support of how their story was told in the movie.

corin_2• 14 years ago

To me it portrayed them as money-grabbing, egotistical and a bit moronic. Is it possible that the film manages to re-inforce whatever views the watcher had before seeing the film, I wonder what somebody who had never heard of those twins before seeing the film would think of them.

eli_gottlieb• 14 years ago

Who?

cheebla• 14 years ago

Money is the great equalizer. I don't imagine they'll have any trouble getting start-ups to take their money. Then again, 65 million seems like a lot of money but if these guys don't know what they're doing it won't last them very long.

wallawe2• 14 years ago

That initial 65 million in equity is worth easily 3x that much now, even more post-IPO

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

I'm sure they can get their dad and his buddies to invest in their fund.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

They didn't seem to have much original to say. Everything they discussed could have been gleaned from Techcrunch, Mashable, etc.

I wonder if their money and network will be enough to compensate for lack of (real) operational experience when they court top tier startup teams.

Reading PG or Thiel, or watching Andreesen's presentations at http://ecorner.stanford.edu, there's a world of value beyond money that they bring to table.

ojbyrne• 14 years ago

I didn't watch the video, but the first question I had was - wouldn't they have become VCs anyway? Harvard Business School, upper class background (right schools, right clubs, etc), probably a massive rolodex (Larry Summers at the very least), and one startup that failed because they didn't hire good lawyers to make sure their programmer didn't get uppity.

This seems to fit the profile of thousands of people in the valley.

yequalsx• 14 years ago

I don't think they have Summers' info on their rolodex.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJgUlme1XQ

spitfire• 14 years ago

They actually come across fairly well. They mention the history of timesharing. Which is an important indicator that they pay attention to history.

This is key, we've had "social networks" since the 80's. We called them BBSes. We dialled them up to chat, play online games, etc. Bring some historical perspective to the party and you can short circuit a lot of work - or just pass off something old as new again.

Their focus on enterprise tech is probably a good one too.

joelrunyon3• 14 years ago

"We focus on early stage disruptive startups." Does this scare anyone else? Just feels like people with money are throwing it around and making it look pretty with buzz words.

wallawe2• 14 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. I wonder how far they have delved into learning about the technology that they are so interested in becoming apart of?

joelrunyon3• 14 years ago

The scary part to me was that they didn't have any criteria at all for the companies they were looking at besides "disruptive tech."

raverbashing• 14 years ago

"Just feels like people with money are throwing it around"

Also, there is this quote: "One of the areas of focus for their fund is cloud computing"

So, it looks like EXACTLY that. They will probably end up with lots of "Pets.com 2.0"

joelrunyon3• 14 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the entire startup ecosystem doesn't end with a bunch of Pets.com clones.

nikcub• 14 years ago

"we think the cloud will be really big"

mind. blown.

bborud2• 14 years ago

followup question: "how big? can you show me?"

binarray2000• 14 years ago

Imagine they invest in your startup and later say "It was our idea!"...

But on a serious note: I'm happy for them because they'll see now that business is more than suing someone for the mere idea.

bborud2• 14 years ago

I think they should hire Aleksey Vayner as their spokesperson.

BadassFractal• 14 years ago

I wonder how many will get that. I still remember the guy, he's awesome.

IsaacL• 14 years ago

People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story. Does this warrant their eternal membership in the tech community's pantheon of evil?

It seems to me like they're trying to put the Facebook thing behind them and use their wealth constructively. If you think startups are generally a net positive for the world, then more money going into startups has to be a good thing. And you have to admit they do have some ability to spot big ideas.

bermanoid2• 14 years ago

People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story.

I'd be fine with the negativity if that was even what happened. But it's not.

They didn't "fail to execute". They were fairly far along in the process of executing ("the previous HarvardConnection programmers had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, back-end coding, and a way users could connect with each other", according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU), and would have finished up just fine with someone else if Zuck hadn't signed on and lied about progress specifically to delay them (that this was his intention came out pretty clearly in the IM conversations that were leaked a couple years ago, he basically lays out his plan to feign progress so that they don't look for someone else to finish ConnectU up before Facebook launches).

It's one thing to get beat to market because you didn't hire the right programmer, that's a straightforward failure of execution; it's another thing altogether to get beat to market by the very programmer that you hired to beat the competitors to market. That makes you a victim of fraud, and I have a lot of sympathy for that.

bermanoid2• 14 years ago

The Zuck > Winklevoss thing here is out of control. Do you guys even understand what really happened?

This is not a tale of "Rich assholes tell hacker about their idea, then sue him for building it without them."

This is "Rich assholes come to hacker with mostly built site, he agrees to finish it up for an equity stake, and then lies to them for two months about progress to make sure that he can beat them to market."

Do all of you Winklevoss-haters even realize that the site was almost done when Zuck joined up?

That the guy that started building the site worked on it for four months and only stopped because he graduated to get a job at Google?

That the next contractor specifically referred Zuck as a good person to get the job finished when he had to leave?

That if Zuck had said "no" they would have found someone else to finish it, but he didn't say "no" because he realized how important it was to be first to market?

It's not like this was some fucking pie-in-the-sky idea. There was code on the table (crafted by a guy that got a job at Google a few months later, so probably pretty decent code), and they were putting money behind getting it finished. The only reason that Facebook beat them to market is that Zuckerberg lied to them for four months about working on it. Specifically so that he could delay them, from the looks of it - his IMs indicate that within a couple weeks of first meeting with them, he'd already decided to string them along but had no intention of actually doing the work.

Do I like the idea of non-technical founders getting hackers to work for equity? No, I don't. It's their right, and it's the hacker's right to foolishly say yes, but I don't think it's ideal.

But I'm far more offended at the idea that a hacker agrees to take on the task of finishing a project, digests the confidential IP (including code) that they've agreed to flesh out, and then lies to the client to delay them and then crush them in the market. That's disgustingly unethical (not to mention fraudulent) behavior.

If you question whether Zuck's motives were really that sinister, read some of his IMs, like the one he sent to Eduardo, in December (3 months before launch, as he was telling the twins that the site was "almost complete"): "Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out." (http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010... - there's more sinister stuff there, too)

Shit like this? He should have lost 100% of the business, plain and simple, and (to their discredit) if the Winklevoss twins had played the legal dispute competently (they should have pushed harder, earlier, and they obviously should not taken the settlement offer when they did), he would have.

9oliYQjP• 14 years ago

I'd love to see the source code to that site at the point it was handed off to Zuck. If this was really near finished, or at least significantly far along, it would be extremely illuminating.

Here's the thing though. How could the Winklevoss twins get strung along for 4 months? Not that this has any relevance to the ethics of the matter. But their contribution to developing this idea was simply money. They needed technical people to build on that idea. Outside of this one idea they funded, they haven't done anything significant or relevant in business since. And now they're just spending money that they got from the settlement.

I'd much rather take a $5 Starbucks coffee and a conversation with Paul Graham over $1M in funding from the Winklevoss twins. I just don't see what value they bring to the table. Money can be found all over the place.

zeruch• 14 years ago

They are not VCs. They are opportunist/tech celebs with a pool of cash. I simply do not see the announcement of them "becoming VCs" as much more than PR. When they actually start investing and getting returns, THEN let's give them some attention.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are now VCs

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