Three of our worst VC stories

Posted by orgonon 4 days ago

Comments

Comment by Frannky 4 days ago

I started a new company with my cofounder 6 months ago. We focused on what people wanted, built a manual solution then automated it. We have 60% margins and a system ready to scale. We are thinking of avoiding investments. I am not sure if we are in a new moment in time where investments are something people do because of what used to be the best to do. And I am not saying avoid blitzscaling but do it without external capital. The hypothesis is that a small team, Claude Code subscriptions, apis and automation/code are enough to make it work via profit reinvested from sales. And it will be actually a competitive advantage because of removed costs, mostly from coordinating a lot of humans and having outside forces pulling in different directions.

Comment by lrvick 4 days ago

Buy a few GPUs so you can skip the Claude subscription, and never have to worry about rate limits, privacy, or refusals. Will pay for itself with a small team in a few months.

I mostly work on custom from scratch Linux operating systems and packages across dozens of languages.

I do 100% of my AI work today using two AMD r9700 pro GPUs on a 10yo pc I pulled out of an old arcade machine.

AI subscriptions only make sense for people who cannot build a basic home computer.

Comment by weitendorf 3 days ago

It’s not cheaper to run Claude in your own GPUs rather than the $200/mo for certain workloads. For a large portion of what I work on, the bottleneck is my time, not tokens. You certainly could throw more tokens at it but if you need it to work a certain way for certain reasons, and your plan/goals are beyond the scope of what the top-capability models can do, then throwing them at the problem just bogs you down in extra cruft or reviews/iteration that you could more effectively do being the primary driver of the work.

Comment by lrvick 2 days ago

Sure, you can keep paying $200/mo to Anthropic forever, and accept heavy censorship on the types of tasks you can do (e.g. malware research), accept no privacy, and accept rate limiting and the requirement of internet access at all times.

Or buy $2400 of GPU today to get you something close to get you within 10% of Opus 4.6 on coding benchmarks, that pays for itself in 1 year, AND you can work with private code and data offline as you like with no censorship or restrictions.

The value proposition of Anthropic is comically bad to anyone that understands how to insert PCI-E cards into a motherboard and install linux.

Comment by momojo 4 days ago

How long has this been your daily driver? How has this setup worked for you compared to enterprise models? Which models?

Comment by lrvick 4 days ago

Maybe 2 months. I have mostly used the Qwen series, and currently running Qwen3.6 27B for programming and debugging and Qwen3.6 35B for speed and research. Both punch way way above their weight and replaced Qwen3.5 122B for me. Qwen 3.6 27B even is, for my workloads, preferable over Big Pickle (GLM-4.6) which is the only large third party model I have used extensively for reference and comparison as it is free and requires no signup or PII via OpenCode. My go to agent solution though is Charm Crush.

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 days ago

Do you have a write up available on your build? A friend is looking for a similar solution where they can offer an API/service for internal use.

Comment by lrvick 2 days ago

Not really much to write up.

Insert 2-4 $1200 r9700 GPUs in a Linux 7.0.0+ machine with 64GB+ of DDR4-5 memory, fire up llama.cpp, and connect with any OpenAI compatible tools.

A free public anonymous LLM like BigPickle can easily set up the software for you if in doubt.

Comment by throw1234567891 3 days ago

You are not shipping all your intellectual property to a third party. There’s nothing more valuable than that.

Comment by Frannky 3 days ago

Yeah, the point was mostly that you can offload a lot of stuff to AI + code — stuff that before you would have needed people for.

Obviously, it becomes better to have local models running on your own hardware — that will be best. I don't think we are there yet, though. Software, yes. If you tweak Pi and DeepSeek Pro, you can get Claude-code-level stuff. You'd still need to buy the hardware, though. Not cheap. Eventually, it will get very cheap.

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by sharts 3 days ago

How do the self hosted models compare in terms of foundational ones? Say comparing to opus 4.8 1M, etc?

Comment by lrvick 2 days ago

Qwen3.6 27b is ~10% worse than Opus 4.6 to be fair (though at a fraction of the size), but in exchange you get to run offline with complete privacy, no rate limiting, no refusals from any task, be it malware research or otherwise. Also my favorite reason: controlling the means of production.

Those are all well worth being a month behind frontier models.

Comment by weitendorf 3 days ago

This is what I’ve been doing. I’m not even against external funding, I just see it as instrumental to the ultimate goal of building a sustainable business. Venture capital is basically a super high interest loan so it’s only something you want to take when and where it can be effectively deployed.

Most other founders/business owners and investors I know don’t see that as a controversial statement (that it makes no sense to see access to capital through a scarcity mindset, when it is factually accessible) but because most customers or potential employers aren’t one of those, it’s been a problem because this isn’t what you’re “supposed to do” and so they read into it from a social/legitimacy angle.

Regardless, it’s quite rewarding IMO and I highly suggest it to people with the means to pursue that path. I don’t see why people get so worked up on the whole VC thing, at the end of the day it’s just lending. Having dabbled in angel investing on the end you get a lot of people lining up for what they clearly perceive as unsecured loans or a social signal and on the other so many people get caught up in the dynamic of dangling said unsecured loans (when I first started it felt like some of the investors reaching out to me were just doing it to boss me around or something, like sir you can clearly see I started this two months ago and you dm’d me on LinkedIn to chat, I don’t need your money).

IMO most good founders/investors are credibility-maxxing but because of the social dynamics and moral hazards inherent with spending OPM you get weird other behavior

Comment by Frannky 3 days ago

Thanks for sharing this. This is the same as what I am thinking. I still see the gravitational pull of doing what seems like the supposed thing to do, but it makes sense to do what the model in our mind suggests makes the most sense, especially when reality is rapidly evolving and historical information may be outdated.

Comment by julianlam 3 days ago

> enough to make it work via profit reinvested from sales.

Yes, this is just called running a business.

Comment by lrvick 4 days ago

I once had a VC ask to meet my founders and I for his morning breakfast at a run down diner in texas. So we fly out from Florida pitch deck in hand, and meet him at his booth.

We pull out the deck, he says "Do not need that. How many paying customers do you have?"

Given we were at MVP stage and were running a public sentiment analysis driven social media search engine using our published academic AI work (15 years ago) we said "None yet. The capital to build the paid portion of our product, which is popular, is why we are here."

As he eats his eggs he goes "Come back when you have a hundred or more paying customers" and sent us packing .

Not even a 5 minute interaction with people he asked to fly out to pitch him, and were not even allowed to pitch.

I expect rejection by default at an early stage, but that one was particularly mean.

It will forever remain my go to example of a meeting that could have been an email.

One excited investor we did find for another project ended up being the now famous con man "Michael Prozer" who got on who wants to marry a millionaire using forged bank records and proceeded to get actual capital based on this lie until he was arrested for fraud.

My opinion of VCs is still... recovering. The bar is in hell.

Comment by sharts 3 days ago

Why is that mean? It seems prudent for any investor to invest based on real metrics.

What’s probably dumb is that none of those questions/concerns were brought up ahead of time (by either side).

Comment by Marciplan 2 days ago

well they could’ve pre-ement that

Comment by simmschi 4 days ago

So, how long did it take you to go 100 customers after this pitch?

Comment by lrvick 4 days ago

In the end my co-founders and investors wanted to sell to a single specific political party exclusively. I chose not to participate as it did not align with my goals, and started a small IT company instead. The original project was dead within a couple months of me leaving given no one else had any idea what ssh was.

Comment by throw1234567891 3 days ago

Was ssh essential to the product?

Comment by lrvick 3 days ago

Being capable of sshing to servers to maintain things sure was.

Comment by keiferski 4 days ago

At what point does this kind of groveling behavior actually become a negative signal, though?

If you’re willing to fly halfway across the country just to talk to a VC in a diner, it signals a lot of desperation IMO.

I haven’t had a ton of interactions with VCs; however, I have read innumerable books about the VC world, and a recurring theme is that VCs are competitive and don’t like being left out of a deal / losing a deal to another VC.

By willing to fly so far away for nothing, it signals that no other VC is interested.

Comment by iJohnDoe 3 days ago

You're not really wrong. However, it was a power play by the VC and to make themselves feel important. Hopefully they grew up a bit since then.

No matter how you look at it, if the only question was, "Do you have 100 customers?" then they could have sent and read that e-mail over breakfast.

Comment by lrvick 3 days ago

Yeah, first "real" startup and we were absolutely desperate for some seed cash. Mistakes were made.

These days I have significantly higher self respect, always have multiple income and funding sources, and a lot more protective of my time.

Comment by keiferski 3 days ago

For sure, hugely rude move by the VC. But unfortunately I’d just expect that from them.

Comment by stevepotter 4 days ago

All I ever hear are horror stories. Can someone tell me a good story about VC that isn't Facebook or something?

Comment by mitchellh 4 days ago

As with all things, the horror stories just get the most attention. People love to rage. There are plenty of boring (good, even!) VCs out there. They just work more quietly, professionally.

I'll share a story, but its about a close friend and not me so I won't name any explicit actors and I'm going to round out the numbers. You either trust me or you don't, but this is a very direct relationship I have to both the founder and VC.

The story is this: the founder started their company outside of SV, so the lawyers weren't super familiar with startups and messed up the initial incorporation and stock plan stuff (actually super common: use Stripe Atlas or pay a startup-aware lawyer!). Went under the radar through years. This company ended up being bought for nearly $1B (with a B) after many rounds and a large board.

During the legal work to close the acquisition, they found out this messed up stock plan. Without going into the details, the effect was that instead of taking home $200M, the founder would take home ~$75M. The mistake the lawyer made almost a decade earlier was about to cost him $125M.

Most of the board basically said "too bad so sad, law is law." But one VC (the one I know, the one I'm talking about) basically strong armed and politicked the whole thing and eventually convinced everyone around the table to give up an equal share of their own holdings to make the founder whole.

Letter to the law: they didn't have to.

Spirit of being founder friendly: this VC went to bat hard and got everyone to yield to make things "right."

Also, look, you might argue $75M vs $200M is just "rich vs rich." Who cares? Sure. That's not the point.

You don't hear about stuff like this because honestly its not a big enough deal and feel good stories get way less clicks than pitchfork stories.

Comment by dang 4 days ago

This is one for https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights!

(I mention this so more people can know the list exists, and hopefully email hn@ycombinator.com when they see comments we should add.)

Comment by satvikpendem 4 days ago

What's the best highlight you've seen?

Comment by dang 4 days ago

I have no memory for that sort of thing. I can't tell you the best movie I've seen or the best record I've heard or anything of that kind. Sorry!

I do think it would be fun to have an "i feel lucky"-style random selection of highlights.

Comment by tptacek 3 days ago

That's not true. The best record you've heard is Television's Marquee Moon.

Comment by dang 3 days ago

It is a hell of a record.

Comment by satvikpendem 4 days ago

I did want to have a random link of a similar nature, hopefully that is interesting enough for HN! I made something similar via a browser HN link, very enlightening.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY 4 days ago

Thanks for that story.

I feel as if basic Personal Integrity is now considered an anachronistic weakness, in the tech industry, and it's heartbreaking. I know that VCs can probably share similar stories [to the OP] about some of the people that pitched them, or their behavior, after getting funded.

Lotta ass, being shown, all around.

At some point in the future, I may consider smaller-scale (local) angel investing, but it seems like such an ugly field, not sure if I'll ever do it. I don't need the money; I would do it to help folks get a leg up.

Comment by pilingual 4 days ago

Could you ask the VC if you could name them in the story?

It's unfortunate that some VCs I respected turned out to repeatedly have their reputation tarnished by such negative stories. I'm not sure what compels founders and VCs to be polarizing and not diplomatic like the old days.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by thadt 4 days ago

Right - and if I ever go to raise VC then that's a guy I'll want to talk to. Even if they themselves don't invest, their recommendation would be valuable.

Life's too short to screw people over - reputation is one of the few things that last after we're gone.

Comment by burnt-resistor 3 days ago

PSA: Integrity is worth more than any amount of money. Anyone who doesn't prioritize that and keeping their word isn't worth anything. One appearance of a selfish move is all it takes to ruin reputations. The subset of big ego celebrity VCs whom cheat almost everyone are liabilities to run away screaming from... deal only with honest people because there's never getting a good deal with a viper.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by bombcar 3 days ago

This is more common than people may realize; I know two cases I was personally involved in where a VC went to bat and “did right” - it’s just not talked about much, as it’s not a terribly interesting story.

Comment by __alexs 4 days ago

I wonder how the LPs in the fund felt when they heard they lost out on this?

Comment by throw03172019 4 days ago

Great story! What was the stock plan mess up that resulted in that?

Comment by wenbin 4 days ago

This is awesome!

Comment by jwatzman 4 days ago

My prospective co-founders and I were pitching to a VC firm that was, on paper, a really good fit for what we were trying to do. The partner we were pitching to was, 15 years ago, briefly my manager's manager -- some work relationship there, she remembered me and I her, but we didn't work super closely together and it had been a very long time. She had moved on at that company to more big-shot things and ultimately become a partner at a respectable VC firm.

About 10 minutes into the pitch, she cut us off, and basically said -- as absolutely kindly as something like this can be directly said -- "I am not going to invest in this, and furthermore I don't think what you're trying to do is investible at all". Then she took a bunch of her time to run us through why, help us understand some very fundamental things about the VC world we didn't quite have right, and generally be brutal but extremely useful in us framing what we were trying to do.

She didn't have to do that. She could have nodded along and then given us a polite "no" like everyone else. She could have cut us off and given us a rude "no". But she didn't -- she made sure to use the time we had to help us as much as she could, even if she very adamantly was not going to invest.

Not a big gesture or anything, but kind and helpful. There's a lot of that. But it doesn't make headlines.

Comment by brianwawok 4 days ago

It’s a very fine line between being helpful and a jerk. Same story to someone else may have ended up as a bad Twitter story.

Comment by DANmode 3 days ago

It’s not a fine line, just subjective truth,

and later replies often elucidate the value actually added,

even when people are complaining.

Lean towards helping! Especially if someone shows traits you want in your society!

Comment by Aurornis 4 days ago

The non-horror stories are usually pretty boring: VC heard the pitch, then either passed politely or wanted to be part of the round. If they joined, they wrote a check and wanted updates.

The VC landscape has changed a lot since some of these stories happened. Many years ago, there were few VCs and even good companies had a hard time getting funding. This created weird environments with some VCs raised funds and then liked having companies crawl to them to beg for the money.

There are still some VCs like that, but there has been an explosion of VC funds and money. Most VCs know they need to work hard to earn the trust of founders that they want to invest in. Leaving a bad impression could mean you're left out of the next round if you want it.

This goes against the popular idea of VCs, but most VCs I've worked with are actually pretty boring, normal, nice people.

Comment by vjeux 4 days ago

Casey Aylward from Accel has been mentioned in all void0 company posts. So she must have been very useful for the founder. (I don't have any insider information about void0, I've met her a few times and she is amazing)

https://voidzero.dev/posts/voidzero-cloudflare#acknowledgeme...

Comment by lyyons 4 days ago

+1 to Casey Aylward being a class act. Super useful and seems to have the magic touch for dev tooling investments.

Comment by margalabargala 4 days ago

There are tons and tons of mundane VC stories. They all mostly just go "we came, we presented, we were funded"

Comment by troyvit 4 days ago

Tony Conrad [1] was the VC that guided our related content engine (Sphere: a vector database before vector databases were cool) through a $25 million exit. Chump change these days but he took really good care of us, leading us through a global recession and then two acquisitions.

[1] https://about.me/tonyconrad

Comment by sskates 4 days ago

I believe Eric Vishria is the best Series A board member of this generation. I've learned more from him about it what it means to be a great CEO over the last 10 years than anyone else. I haven't heard of another founder who has spoken as highly as their Series A investor.

I've been meaning to write up my story with him. Now is a great time with all the horror stories on others that have been coming out.

He sticks through his companies for over a decade, which is rare in this business: https://x.com/ericvishria/status/2051459386372149506

Comment by maccard 4 days ago

I was just an engineer at a vc backed startup but our interactions with the VCs were totally normal - they were no better or worse than when we worked with publishers or other external funding sources.

Comment by trumpdong 4 days ago

The best possible case is that you get a cash infusion now in exchange for giving up a huge percentage of your future revenue and control of the company.

Comment by Hammershaft 4 days ago

I mean the goal is that the money invested increases the value of the company so that the founder's reduced stake is worth considerably more than the founder's full stake of the counterfactual company where he didn't take VC money. VCs can be strongly positive sum.

Comment by cyberax 4 days ago

Sure. They are usually just very boring: you made a pitch, got funded. The VCs used their connections to get you good advisors and/or introduce you to prospective clients.

Comment by joshu 4 days ago

i raised twice from USV. class acts all around. too many stories to count, but they always had my back.

Comment by emmelaich 4 days ago

You might want to listen to the Ron Conway episodes of the https://www.thesocialradars.com/ podcast.

Comment by cowthulhu 4 days ago

#3 is insane, if for no other reason than the VC is signaling that he’s likely going to try and do the same thing to you some day… even if you were totally willing to screw over your team, why would you ever get involved with that VC given you’ll then have to watch your back until the end of time?

Comment by cryzinger 4 days ago

I think a lot of people fail to recognize that they're the next target, or convince themselves they're special in some way that makes them immune. It's like when someone knowingly participates in an affair and tells themselves "Sure, they're cheating on their current partner to be with me, but after they break things off I know we'll be together forever!"

Comment by CPLX 4 days ago

Some people really do thrive on this shit though. They know the rules of the game and want to play it. What they’re really thinking is they’ll be better at the game than their opponents.

I mean can you actually imagine the internal monologue of a guy like Sam Altman?

Comment by bombcar 3 days ago

LLMs have more of an internal monologue, and they have none.

Comment by DANmode 3 days ago

Not exactly true:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

They’re even trying to expose some of it as a summary, as part of the anthropomorphization of Claude.

Comment by raverbashing 4 days ago

Yup, exactly this

For example, if you go off with the cheating partner, don't expect it to not happen again

Comment by toxic 4 days ago

Because if you get involved with most VCs, you will then have to watch your back until the end of time.

None of those "worst experiences" seem all that unusual to me (though nobody will say #1 out loud anymore until after they've invested), and #3 is completely in character for Vinod.

Comment by root-parent 4 days ago

If one partner is the core of the company, and the others the VC thinks are useless ( I am not saying in this case they were...just that the VC might have that perception) what should the VC do?

After all its just business decisions like Cloudflare recent layoffs no?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/

Comment by stackghost 4 days ago

If they truly are useless that's one thing, but the ability to "impress" some asshole in a 30 minute pitch has little to do with running a successful tech company.

With what authority are VCs claiming to be capable of being an accurate judge of talent or character in less than an hour?

Sounds like said VC in your example is doing insufficient due diligence and just investing based on vibes.

Comment by bartread 4 days ago

I suppose one could argue that VCs develop a taste for it after speaking with so many founders.

But, of course, you often don’t find out what lay down the road not travelled, except for those companies that get funded elsewhere, so it’s not like there’s an obvious objective measure.

I can’t help wondering if it’s a bit like Moneyball though and, if you had good enough data that you could model it well enough, you’d discover a lot of that taste is just shooting bull and doesn’t amount to much. Possibly there’d be a lot of variability across VCs.

Comment by root-parent 4 days ago

>> the ability to "impress" some asshole in a 30 minute pitch has little to do with running a successful tech company.

Judging by the stories being shared here, that is all it takes to get funded...

Comment by stackghost 4 days ago

Sure but the act of actually securing VC funding is a small part of running a company. Those VCs are not going to recoup their investments if they pick people who optimize for funding and not for product vision and good leadership.

Comment by recursive 4 days ago

They have superior taste of course.

Comment by segmondy 4 days ago

something pattern something matching something

Comment by sunjieming 4 days ago

Yeah, this is par for the course with VC. You should never believe your VC (even post funding) is your friend. They can be a great business partner and resource but they're never your friend under that dynamic

Comment by htrp 4 days ago

there is a saying about mixing business with pleasure

Comment by darth_avocado 4 days ago

Because rich and powerful people also have massive egos to go with their power and money. Some of them will find your rejection a personal attack and try to actively sabotage you. Not all VCs are like that, but there are enough of them that you need to be careful about how you handle the situation.

Comment by Bob459105 4 days ago

[dead]

Comment by wslh 4 days ago

Sadly, I've experienced this myself, and I'm aware of other people who were cut off from opportunities in similar ways. I applaud the tweet because this is important to say out loud: we are often not living in the world we think we are observing. Many people know this, but few talk about it. It's an open secret.

Comment by wheels 4 days ago

I had the same thing happen (though seed round). I don't think it's uncommon. Also never took another meeting with the guy.

Comment by tehwebguy 4 days ago

omfg that’s the beach access guy

Comment by foobarbecue 4 days ago

ugh. That douchebag doesn't even surf.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by timdorr 4 days ago

Vinod is insane. You can hear more of his really bad takes on his recent Sam Harris podcast episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/479...

Comment by TrackerFF 4 days ago

My pet theory is that it is more nurture than nature. These (VC) veterans have seen thousands of startups come and go, and become so desensitized to the ruthlessness.

Of course to people like the author, it seems borderline sociopathic to casually suggest such levels of betrayal. It is like trying to get into the most exclusive nightclubs, and when you're finally in the front, the bouncer will look at the group and say "You can get in, but not those two". It sucks, but to the bouncer it is just business as usual, and you're just another face.

Comment by lovich 4 days ago

Nah, he was talking about taking their stock. That’s morally theft even if by some convoluted reason it’s not legally theft.

I get the business as usual analogy but the specifics of the interaction are different. You just showing up to your club with your friends is different than having equity in a company you cofounded.

Comment by AndrewKemendo 4 days ago

I could write a book with the horror stories I have of VC and LP behavior, and some of the wild stuff I’ve either been asked to do, verified others were asked to do or say it’s just totally unhinged.

I don’t know if Angel investing groups are really still around like they were in there 2010s but the variance in the types of insanity and weirdness for those groups is really unmatched.

Comment by moralestapia 4 days ago

>some of the wild stuff I’ve either been asked to do

Oh man, I'm really sorry you had to go through that :'(.

Comment by AndrewKemendo 4 days ago

Yeah same, but eye opening no less

Comment by metadat 4 days ago

Tell us one or two, then!

Comment by AndrewKemendo 4 days ago

The (fun?) one that stands out the most were the Pittsburgh Angels (2013 probably) and they literally have a long round table that they dine at in a closed off room in this country club. They take like one or two pitches a month and tell you that they generally do 300-500k checks.

I was invited and drove 3 hours. They then put you in a giant dining room with all the country club members eating dinner, with your own table by yourself. They tell you to order whatever you want, and wait there, and when the group is ready you'll be summoned to dance.

Anyway, whenever they are ready which was like an hour and a half, they call you in and you have to be ready.

While they loudly eat dessert you are supposed to walk around this 20' long table pitching them whatever you're doing and then you have to take questions from them, while still walking around a table. No presentation place, no place to sit, no real way to talk with everyone, you're always talking over someone's head.

Then they say thank you and on the way out you get a bill for whatever you ate.

That was one of the "nice" ones. There's tons of bullshit networks like TiE, Keiretsu forum, YoungPresidentsOrganization shit like that are all social clubs for wannabe oligarchs.

I think every Chinese backed firm on sand hill road at the time was a front for Chinese billionaires money laundering, I'm sure I have the giant spreadsheet of funds I talked to from 2016 that later turned out to be almost exactly that like Rothenberg Ventures.

The bad ones are LP's sexually assaulting people and being told to ignore it or that it's no big deal (I didn't ignore it and people got fired). Or when LPs push CEOs to fire more people than they need to, or to raise money through some shady vehicle to get it off the books. Not to mention seeing too many people that later were in the Panama/Epstein files.

Literally horrific

Comment by anonym00se1 4 days ago

They tell you to order whatever you want, then surprise you with a bill at the end?

Comment by AndrewKemendo 4 days ago

I was also baffled

Comment by giancarlostoro 4 days ago

The first I heard of Cloudflare was a recommendation from someone who used to DDoS websites (and yes they've been arrested for related crimes, long story), and I thought "what the heck is Cloudflare" then over the coming years, I kept seeing other friends using it. It's really interesting that Cloudflare was able to pop into a market that Akamai could have snagged for themselves or outright tried to buy out Cloudflare.

It's a bit crazy in hindsight that companies would have avoided investing, considering this is a space someone like Akamai occupied, and clearly there is value in this space. It's incredible to see how Cloudflare has grown over the years, kind of happy they grew as much as they did, a bit surprised by some of those VC nightmare scenarios.

Comment by snowwrestler 4 days ago

Cloudflare is fantastic at marketing, and pretty good at technology. I evaluated them twice for enterprise contracts and both times picked a competitor. The first time, it was DosArrest for DDOS protection, which was a much better value per dollar (but they sucked at marketing.) The second time, we needed a CDN with particular features and Fastly was a better fit.

My point is that it’s very very hard to know in advance that a startup is going to be awesome at marketing. Their tech was not, on its own, a giant moat or a “must have” standout. So I can see why some VCs shrugged.

Comment by jaggederest 4 days ago

And as someone who briefly had to interact with Akamai, the deficiencies in their product are not even close to subtle.

Comment by raverbashing 4 days ago

Sounds like how WeWork ate Regus's lunch even while being made of crazy

Comment by jaggederest 4 days ago

That's a remarkably well-called shot, honestly, damn, wish I thought of that!

Comment by youngtaff 3 days ago

And yet Akamai is profitable… whereas Cloudflare is not…

Comment by jaggederest 3 days ago

They'll never see any of my money...

Comment by tempaccount420 3 days ago

There are more important things than money.

Comment by michaelcampbell 3 days ago

To a corporation?

Comment by carefulfungi 4 days ago

I doubt VCs have different distribution of personal character from other professional groups.

In my experience, a more interesting friction is that VCs are pursuing a diversification strategy while founders are pursing a singleton strategy.

Comment by ajb 4 days ago

It used to be that VCs wanted founders to pursue a singleton strategy, because they wanted the diversification to occur at the level of their portfolio - on the grounds that at the level of an individual startup, diversification would less likely to succeed. The catchphrase was that they wanted "pure play" investments. So it would be interesting to know why it's now a cause of friction. (The "pure play" thing was actually from before YC took off and gave founders a bit more agency; and before the "pivot" was popularised; I get the impression that VCs back then were not too happy for a founder to change direction and confuse their portfolio)

Comment by mattas 4 days ago

VCs are the shotgun cartridge and startups are the shot.

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 4 days ago

After reading some of these stories, I don't see how you can't come away thinking that psychopathy is a trait that goes hand in hand with being a successful VC. The story about Vinod Khosla speaks for itself, but after reading #2 I clicked on Marc Andreesen's twitter profile, which currently says this:

> You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser. That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me.

These fuckers are grotesque caricatures in human skin.

Comment by Our_Benefactors 4 days ago

This quote is from a viral interview between Jensen Huang and Dwarkesh Patel, the latter made some points during the interview that were very condescending and betrayed a deep misunderstanding of technology.

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 3 days ago

Thanks, I wasn't aware of the original source.

FWIW, while I think the comment makes much more sense in the context of that original video, I don't think Huang is making particularly good points in that interview. Like I thought the analogy with enriched uranium was a pretty good one, and at the very least Patel made exceedingly clear which points are analogous: namely, that it was powerful tech that had both civilian and military uses. That seems like a very fair discussion point when it comes to powerful chips. And Huang's response is just "Hey - that's a bad analogy", but I think his defense of it being a bad analogy is a poor one. Plus, I think it's false to say that Patel "betrayed a deep misunderstanding of technology" given that one quote he gave about why it would be a bad idea to sell advanced chips to China came from Dario Amodei of all people. I'm quite positive Amodei doesn't have "a deep misunderstanding of technology".

But back to the original topic, I still think it's beyond douchebaggery to make that quote your header in your Twitter bio, but it also fits with literally everything else I've heard from Andreessen to confirm to me he's far to the right on the psychopathy (i.e. "lacks empathy") spectrum. He's constantly dividing the world up into "winners" and "losers", and being a billionaire he's obviously a "winner", and if you propose any changes to society or regulations that would help lessen the naturally wealth-concentrating effects of technology then you're obviously a "loser".

Comment by teaearlgraycold 4 days ago

If you're not aware that's actually a quote from Jensen Huang.

Comment by tty456 4 days ago

I hear story #1 periodically, but almost never see a quote. How is this stuff said specifically? It always seems like hearsay. I'm sure it's authentic, but I'd love to hear the details on how that stuff is actually said in conversation.

Comment by malshe 4 days ago

Someone asked him this down the thread. He replied that it was said to him. So it’s a first party account.

Comment by tty456 4 days ago

It's interesting he provides quotes for the other stories, but not this one. And still doesn't in the thread. Again, i'm not debating the authenticity, but is it possible he's inferring that based on something not-so-explicit being said?

I'd love to see/hear the words that people actually say when I hear stories like "they said they wouldn't [invest/buy/etc] from me because i'm a woman".

Comment by InsideOutSanta 3 days ago

When I studied comp sci in the early 00s, a prof just flat out told us in a male-only class that women had no place in comp sci. I'm not at all surprised that shitty men are open about their thoughts on women when they assume that they are talking to people who agree with them.

Comment by sevenseacat 2 days ago

In 2015, working at a software consultancy. Led a small project, delivered it, client was happy, moved onto the next project, thought nothing more of it.

At the company Christmas party that year (which had clients invited, for reasons I do not know) - that client merrily said to my face "boy, I thought the project was going to fail with a woman in charge, but you sure proved me wrong!"

Apparently I had murder written all over my face, and coworkers who overheard were impressed I didn't deck him.

Comment by malshe 3 days ago

Maybe he wrote his first tweet then thought of putting direct quotes in the next two. Not everything needs to be a conspiracy.

Comment by jphil529 4 days ago

Really sad that people are still walking around with those beliefs.

Comment by chasebank 4 days ago

I came across this thread on twitter this morning but isn't he the CEO / co-founder and he's clearly a man? I guess I don't get the reference. I know he has a co-founder who's a female, maybe she was lead at the time?

"1. A Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because he didn’t think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company. Seriously. "

Comment by emmelaich 4 days ago

He's referring to Michelle Zatlyn afaict.

"Young Global Leader '14. Co-founder, President + COO Cloudflare"

Comment by flawn 4 days ago

The fact that you hear this often (also not only from the victims of this) should signal that, even without quotes, there is likely some truth to it.

Comment by ohyoutravel 4 days ago

This doesn’t follow logically.

Comment by tamimio 4 days ago

Link for non x users:

https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2062860530360959273

Comment by dzonga 2 days ago

maybe it's the peculiarity of the tech industry to make it seem they're doing something entirely new & different in the world.

how did unproven, fringe ideas get funded before the 1960s ?

you either took a loan, some rich patrons put some money or you were financed by vendor financing. most of these terms were not humiliation rituals. they were built on trust & knowing each other.

the bad & good were funded that way whether merchant expeditions, slavery, colonialism, steam engines.

you didn't have Venture capital. & soon enough venture capital will disappear altogether.

Comment by swyx 4 days ago

theres always a story behind the story. wondering why he chose today to say these

Comment by k099 4 days ago

Greg Isenberg's viral tweet about VC that fell asleep during a pitch kicked off a bunch of other tweets about weird VC experiences this week:

https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/2061794787825479818

Some QTs:

https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/2062768969560510486

https://x.com/typesfast/status/2062791307094048937

https://x.com/awxjack/status/2062605286683336757

https://x.com/travisk/status/2062224472426365045

https://x.com/mark_cummins/status/2062293061426663612

Comment by dang 4 days ago

Oh thanks! I'll add these to the toptext.

Comment by nailer 4 days ago

Can you please fix the URL? HN policy is to link to the canonical site rather than an archive service, which I’m sure you are aware of. Thanks!

Comment by dang 4 days ago

Which URL?

Comment by nailer 3 days ago

These ones:

https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/2062768969560510486

https://x.com/typesfast/status/2062791307094048937

https://x.com/awxjack/status/2062605286683336757

https://x.com/travisk/status/2062224472426365045

https://x.com/mark_cummins/status/2062293061426663612

Which were replaced with non-canonical URLs:

https://xcancel.com/dunkhippo33/status/2062768969560510486

https://xcancel.com/typesfast/status/2062791307094048937

https://xcancel.com/awxjack/status/2062605286683336757

https://xcancel.com/travisk/status/2062224472426365045

https://xcancel.com/mark_cummins/status/2062293061426663612

Apparently by you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420245

Comment by dang 3 days ago

Ah, I see. I actually originally posted the x.com links but plenty of HN users can't read Twitter threads that way, so we usually try to provide a readable alternative. (Plus this helps to reduce offtopic complaints in threads.) You'll therefore often see both a twitter/x link and the corresponding xcancel link in toptext - like in these recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317774

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48311485

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212493

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071262

In the current case, I decided not to do that because it would have made the toptext way too noisy, so I chose the domain that most people would be able to read.

As for HN's policy, you're right about the rule but not its scope. It only applies to submission links, i.e. the URL that a story title is linked to, which also determines the domain displayed to the right of the title.

Comment by nailer 3 days ago

> HN users can't read Twitter threads that way

This doesn’t seem correct. I can view all of these without a Twitter login. Compare this with nytimes, where a login is required but we still always post the canonical URL per the guideline.

> Plus this helps to reduce offtopic complaints in threads.

That can be a fixed with moderation and bans.

Comment by dang 3 days ago

That's why I said "threads". As far as I understand it, logged-out users can see the initial tweet at a link, but not the replies.

> That can be a fixed with moderation and bans.

That is an excessive view of what can be done with hard power!

Comment by nailer 3 days ago

That’s still inconsistent with the NYTimes is handled - people paste non login links as comments if they’re wanted - and makes the links less useful for people that do have Twitter accounts.

Comment by dang 3 days ago

I don't see any inconsistency. Users are asked to submit the original source as the top link. Workaround/archive URLs are welcome in the comments. We sometimes put such links in the toptext too. It works the same for any site.

Comment by nailer 2 days ago

There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to not apply the submission policy to the top text, for the same reason it’s applied to the link.

Comment by dang 2 days ago

The toptext is often used for archive links which allow users to read otherwise-paywalled articles.

Comment by fastball 4 days ago

Well he did retweet another tweet that kickstarted the convo, very possible he saw that tweet, said to himself "I have some of these to share!" and then proceeded to... do so.

Comment by mitchellh 4 days ago

probably just been long enough that he doesn't give a shit

source: most of the bullshit i surface up nowadays

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by swyx 4 days ago

i mean right but even you hold back some stuff because youre a Nice Person yknow? haha

Comment by Quarrelsome 4 days ago

These VC stories continue to feed my incredulity at how people _that_ incompetent can still be _that_ wealthy.

Is it the money that makes them stupid or smth?

Comment by boelboel 4 days ago

Getting extreme wealth is more so about luck in various forms than competence/intelligence. If it were just about the latter everyone who's intelligent/competent would be rich. You don't hear about boring wealthy people either.

Comment by rwmj 4 days ago

Why do you think people who lucked into vast riches by being in the right place at the right time would be especially smarter than anyone else?

Comment by wahnfrieden 4 days ago

Competence, intelligence, merit have little connection to wealth. Wealth at that level is attained through arguably unfair means, not from reward for hard work. Conversely, poor people are not poor as punishment for lack of intelligence or merit

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by itkovian_ 4 days ago

In many cases the GPs are not, at least nowhere near as much as you’d think. Obviously there are power laws here as well. Non partners, forget about it.

The other thing is it is maybe the most nepotistic industry out there. Which somewhat makes sense given the actual job is so relationship based.

Comment by jaggederest 4 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud among other factors - being someone who talks right and plays metaphorical ball with the correct people matters more than any amount of intelligence or competence.

Comment by nailer 4 days ago

HN policy is to link to the site. If someone wants to use an archive service they’ll use it, meanwhile most of us want to be able to reply, follow, read etc.

Comment by NDlurker 4 days ago

East Dakota is Western Minnesota. This is MAGA country

Comment by maest 4 days ago

He's a very MAGA guy, though.

Comment by fg137 4 days ago

Did the author edit the tweet/post or am I crazy? There are only two stories

Comment by bagels 4 days ago

For some reason they're not threaded on the twitter link, but you can see them threaded on the xcancel link:

https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2062860530360959273

Comment by duskwuff 4 days ago

The third is in a reply. Use the XCancel link to view it without logging in.

Comment by FerretFred 2 days ago

Fascinating - thanks for sharing!

Comment by satvikpendem 4 days ago

More and more I see why bootstrapping is the way to go. And especially in this SaaSpocalypse with AI companies commoditizing entire companies with new feature releases like Claude Design or Codex for legal, it's better to just run your little corner of the Internet and make sustainable money over hyperscaling with millions and billions and being put out of business the next week.

One might say why bootstrappers won't get erased too but they can carve out a specific market too small for AI companies to want to touch, and still remain sustainable rather than needing to make a ton of money; and pivoting as a venture backed company can be much harder as there are more people to please like investors and your employees which you likely have more of than a bootstrapper.

Comment by root-parent 4 days ago

>> More and more I see why bootstrapping is the way to go.

That does not match the definition of success here...the trick is to become a billionaire and call yourself an entrepreneur without ever turning a profit.... :-)

Then keep getting acquired, become a VC, do the same on and on.

Clouflare is an example as a loss making company, every single Musk company with the exception of his state subsided Tesla, Epic Games, Snap, DoorDash, WeWork, Rivian, Lucid, Peloton, Roblox, Wayfair, Lyft, Reddit, ...

Being a real business, and turning a profit, is very, very hard, you have Google, Amazon and a infinitesimal few...

Comment by satvikpendem 4 days ago

Seems people downvoting don't understand your sardonicism lol

Comment by jviotti 4 days ago

This. Here is my bootstrapped niche corner of the internet: https://www.sourcemeta.com

Comment by satvikpendem 4 days ago

Nice, how's the revenue/profit? Seems hard to monetize.

Comment by ralph84 4 days ago

On one hand, every VC who passed on Cloudflare missed out on what is now an $88 billion company. On the other, if they didn't invest because they didn't like the underlying economics, they were actually correct. 17 years after founding, Cloudflare still has never turned a profit.

Comment by navs 4 days ago

As bad as these VCs seem to be it's something to see Prince socializing with other bad actors like Maguire while lamenting the bad actors in the space.

Comment by LordJim 4 days ago

What's bad about Maguire?

Comment by mi_lk 4 days ago

what is the "meeting scheduled on Monday clue"?

Comment by joshu 4 days ago

partner meeting

Comment by camel_gopher 4 days ago

Next up, one of our worst CEO stories

Comment by c2h5oh 4 days ago

A CEO got entire 20 man dev team into boardroom and asked everyone to voice any concerns about technical debt, bad development practices, anti patterns as well as project management issues.

The 4 people who spoke up were all fired on the same day 3 or 4 weeks later. 7 more quit shortly after - as soon as they got any decent offer. 6 months later about a quarter of the 20 were still with the company.

Comment by youngtaff 1 day ago

Which CEO?

Comment by c2h5oh 1 day ago

One that got pushed out by investors, which is good enough for me. No need to name and shame beyond that.

Comment by owenthejumper 4 days ago

There was once a CEO who built a great company, then decided to fire 20 % of the company and call those people publicly "measurers", so they are basically tainted in the marketplace. Oh wait...that was eastdakota