
Show HN: Parrot.vc – I forced a bot to read 65,000 VC tweets and it became a VC - nloui
https://www.parrot.vc/
======
dondudu
> Income inequality is an enormous problem. What do you use it for?

... this is amazing.

~~~
other_herbert
"Maybe in some niche B2B fields I don't know your people just randomly die in
your house while you are there."

I hope these weren't related

------
pg_bot
"I think this is God’s gift to me to understand that I'm not investing you if
your idea doesn't slap, HARD."

[https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv-_lL5xTiAl_dpthO7](https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv-
_lL5xTiAl_dpthO7)

------
nloui
Parrot.vc is a bot trained on tens of thousands of VC tweets that uses
predictive text to generate amazing, new startup advice. Share your favorites!

Gavin Belson - hit me up, this is the perfect acquisition for Hooli.

PS - you can follow Parrot.vc on Twitter as well
([https://twitter.com/parrot_vc](https://twitter.com/parrot_vc))

~~~
smacktoward
Is the source code available anywhere? I’ve been mulling over a similar
project but don’t have a lot of ML experience myself, would be great to look
at the innards of a working example...

~~~
pequalsnp
An easy way to get started that doesn't use pure ML is Markovify [1]. I used
it for a couple of projects last year.

[1] -
[https://github.com/jsvine/markovify](https://github.com/jsvine/markovify)

------
Bootwizard
"With a powerful narrative, you should be able to go from raw materials to a
launch ready vehicle in 60 days."

If this isn't the best sign of the times, idk what is.

Edit: This one killed me

"VC is hard. This is a great fucking deck..."

~~~
theli0nheart
Hmm, that's weird. I got the exact same phrases. Are these actually bot-
generated in real-time or is the app just pulling from a set?

~~~
g4d
I also got "VC is hard. This is a great fucking deck..."

------
corodra
Okay, I've spent a little more time on this than I probably should have, but I
think I realized something. The reason this works is mostly due to the VCs
being generic in general. I've been reading the tweets they're based on and
they're equally nonsense as the bot tweet. But bashing multiple tweets
together, still produces something that's... coherent? I mean, yea, they're
coherent. But it works because it lacks detail.

There's almost no detail or focus on a concrete idea in any of these VC
tweets. Everything is so damn vague and abstract in the original tweets, they
can apply to anything or anyone. Thus, chopping and mixing them is
meaningless, because they are void of meaning to begin with... Sort of the
same way horoscopes work. They're pretty broad and the reader fills in the
gaps and details. VCs talk like old gypsy fortune tellers... they're vague,
tell you roughly what you'd like to hear and are generally useless sacks of
breathing meat...

Damn, that was a wild ride...

~~~
yjhoney
Agreed. Most VCs are just that, useless sacks of breathing meat.

For that reason, I've avoided them. Even during parties, I (unfairly) dismiss
someone the moment I find out they are a VC and just invested in ...(insert
famous tech here)...

Based on personal experience, VCs are statistically more likely having a
conversation with you thinking they are better than you the whole time (and
therefore knows better).

Not all VCs are like that, but unfortunately most of them are. Greedy,
prideful people have caused me a great deal of suffering in my life and most
VCs are just that.

~~~
todd3834
> thinking they are better than you the whole time

Do people really think like that? This sounds like possibly a personal
insecurity. I don’t know too many grown adults who think things like “I am
better than you”. Better at what? making money? Smarter? Getting dates?

I don’t know... maybe I’m just too optimistic but all of the VCs I’ve met have
been super nice.

~~~
mikekchar
I a lot of people measure their own self worth by comparing themselves to
others. For people with a job where they directly create something, usually
they are proud of that thing they created. People who work in these kinds of
business roles often don't actually _do anything_. They have to see themselves
as a necessary (and rare!) oil that enables creators. For many, it's really
important to their self worth that they think, "Without me, you would be
nothing. Yes, I know you can actually do the thing that you are doing, but _I_
am the gatekeeper."

I mean, some people think that VCs are "useless sacks of breathing meat". So
when the VC in question needs to feel a sense of self worth, they need to come
up with a reason that they are needed in the equation (whether justified or
not). They also need to project that feeling because who will seek out a VC
that's a useless sack of breathing meat. You want to seek out a VC that's the
gatekeeper to riches.

You get this kind of sub-vocal interplay and posturing. I'm sure it's super
stressful to the people in question. Every time they meet someone they may
feel they have to justify their progression beyond meat sack level. They may
feel that they have to justify it to themselves.

And interestingly, having projected their desired ego and internally swallowed
their own special brand of Kool Aide, quite a few are actually convinced that
they _are_ the gatekeepers to riches and everybody else is lucky just to be in
the same room.

Being human is hard.

------
mef
Capital is in such oversupply that you have to lock down the system from
yourself to credibly tell customers you won't screw them over.

[https://www.parrot.vc/-Luq3q03hYSF0vm4mVUb](https://www.parrot.vc/-Luq3q03hYSF0vm4mVUb)

~~~
mrtksn
I think this means that there's so much capital out there that you can operate
without any profit until you dominate the market, so your users will
effectively be convinced that you are a saint. Just remember to lock down the
system from yourself and don't say anything that can break this illusion.

------
georgewsinger
VC twitter is excruciatingly cringe. I cannot imagine giving equity to these
virtue signaling parrots.* The worst offenders are the people who

\- have never personally taken a company from zero to one (even worse: when
they have internally taken a company from 1 to N, and think that qualifies
them).

\- have a huge portfolio full of incremental companies

\- constantly talk about trends on Twitter

\- constantly talk about politics on Twitter

\- are not currently operating their own moonshot/Unicorn

\- are a bit too ridiculous when trying to hide their own greed

\- talk constantly about the importance of "mentoring" you, when really just
wanting access to your company

\- have never actually taken a hard stand/risk on anything in their entire
lives

Imagine instead getting a small check from Elon Musk when he was operating at
Tesla/SpaceX, or even from then-no-name Sam Altman when he was running Loopt
(as Stripe did from both). These investors are great because you know they're
going to soon step the fuck out of your way and focus on their own projects.
They might also be able to actually help you when you need it (both parties
respecting each other's scarce time).

* Exceptions: PG, Naval, and part-time VC partners that actively operate their own companies.

~~~
slap
The quoted long lines are unreadable on mobile unfortunately

~~~
StacyRoberts
Why does everyone bash the commenters for using these quotes instead of hn for
not fixing it? It's not like it's hard to fix.

------
whalesalad
I clicked through like 15 of these and they were all pretty nonsensical. Not
sure if this is more damning of tweets from VC's or the bot itself...

~~~
nloui
Haha I'm sure it's somewhere in the middle. Never said it was the smartest
algorithm. If you hover over the VC's name, it'll show the actual tweet that
was sampled.

~~~
whalesalad
You wouldn't happen to be from the La Cañada area of SoCal would you?

~~~
nloui
Born and raised!

~~~
whalesalad
I’m pretty sure I used to see a physical therapist as a kid who knew you well.
She knew I was building websites and told me about you and what you were
working on. If I remember correctly you used to be quite stoked about
Coldfusion. What a small world!

~~~
nloui
Jane?! That is a small world and a great memory! I used to be a huge
ColdFusion fan.

------
Rainymood
>I was trying to make a profit is pretty constraining. You have to satisfy
customers or you go out of business. [1]

Hehe this one was pretty good.

[1]
[https://www.parrot.vc/-LuhxfJS6wU2jI7ulPj0](https://www.parrot.vc/-LuhxfJS6wU2jI7ulPj0)
via @parrot_vc

------
mushufasa
"I stand with the people of China and that they need to hire researchers to
design some new architecture, or anything extremely fancy."

This is amazing. Reminds me of the postmodernism generator:
[http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/](http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/)

~~~
dozzman
I just got the same one... Are they pre-generated maybe?

Edit: Link:
[https://www.parrot.vc/-LvAxcZD23ySp2dL0sZw](https://www.parrot.vc/-LvAxcZD23ySp2dL0sZw)

~~~
nloui
They generate on a cron job every 15 minutes and I also pass the site through
a Cloudflare cache because I'm cheap and the actual code runs on a $5
DigitalOcean box :-)

~~~
apsdsm
That’s not cheap: that’s smart. Knowing this makes me like the whole thing
even more.

------
papageek
"Trading legally on inside information is one of the most valuable places on
the Internet."

[https://www.parrot.vc/-Lutw051bTJRl4uGlK0i](https://www.parrot.vc/-Lutw051bTJRl4uGlK0i)
\-- wallstreetbets here I come!

------
oxguy3
"Thinking about diversity in terms of ethnicity, gender, and/or education
status, you are leaving money on the table."

Perfection.

------
rc-1140
"Canceling sneaky charges is one of the most predictable but consequential
developments of the 2020s"[0]

 _Instantly_ reminded of all of the posts about ISPs and cellular carriers
tacking on all sorts of goofy fees and their usual monetary "practices", felt
it was especially relevant now that some of those fees are being exposed as
being BS surcharges anyway. Can't name any sources off the top of my head but
there was an article here on HN about it some months ago.

[0]
[https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv6SAuk6w0OJpbhw22_](https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv6SAuk6w0OJpbhw22_)

~~~
nloui
Ugh my relationship with Spectrum

------
JakeWesorick
It looks like it uses tweets that were a reply to another tweet. This makes
some of them read weird since there is missing context. I wonder what it would
look like if it only used tweets that were original.

~~~
nloui
Hmmm I hadn't thought of that. That's a great point.

------
corodra
Great, congrates, sounds like your bot is going to be the first computer
program to demand worker's rights and protection from cruel and unusual
punishment.

But seriously wanted to say it's pretty stellar and so far none of these seem
"bot" like. They read pretty genuine... which says a lot of how idiotic a lot
of these VCs are.

------
madisonmay
@nloui any chance you're willing to share your dataset? Would be fun to
replicate this with GPT-2 fine-tuning instead of a Markov chain.

~~~
nloui
Sure, I should be able to throw it onto a repo later.

~~~
heavyset_go
Ping this thread when you do!

------
ericjang
"I have nothing to do with startups but everything to do with my original
statement."

Source:
[https://www.parrot.vc/-LumCfM7z4sQiNiXMJIU](https://www.parrot.vc/-LumCfM7z4sQiNiXMJIU)

------
superasn
> "the bear is sticky with honey"

If you don't understand the tweets, it's because they have a deeper meaning.

------
elamje
“My long-promised current view of what I want to be remembered, the guy who
invented the crapper rule.”

... A rogue philosopher VC

“There’s nothing lean about spending 12-18 mo working hard to make a lot of
money.“

------
wtracy
Most of the ones I got looked like they were generated from replies to other
tweets. The lack of context made them boring, even if that makes it easier to
make them comprehensible. (I would love to see this experiment run on a
dataset that filtered out reply tweets.)

But then, it have me this gem:

"It's sad when people don't understand the value of a program that targets
them. I mean I do see the value, I just don't like floppy pizza."

------
psalminen
> I would like to see if there’s demand. But I am talking about _dead_. As in
> no pulse.

This one is too weird.

------
ryanmercer
Thank you for sharing this, some of these are pure gold.

This one is just fun

\- "Sorkin is going to have a custom GIF library curated by @jposhaughnessy."

These sound like fodder for an insider trading prosecution:

\- "Saved a man going into an interview with that. One of my favorite funds
rn."

\- "Amazing company. I was thinking more in terms of deploying, deleting,
etc."

\- "Canceling sneaky charges is one of the most predictable but consequential
developments of the 2020s."

\- "YC partners know, because they get around advertising, because a lot of
material on this."

\- "Could agree more. Have looked at a bunch of #rockstarninjas but ended up
with a bigger bag of money they will leave you to secure the bag."

------
threatofrain
> The future isn't always like the past. Causal first principles thinking
> matters!

Hmm...

------
Archit3ch
> Notice I didn't say the users had to use the fact that prior financings are
> used as comps for other financings.

Ingenious.

My favourite Markov chain is the one trained on Puppet documentation and the
works of H.P. Lovecraft.

------
mreome
> It's sad when people don't understand the value of a program that targets
> them. I mean I do see the value, I just don't like floppy pizza.

This one made me laugh.

------
charlesju
This is hilarious. Can we get a blog on how you built it?

~~~
nloui
Sure, definitely. Or just retrain Parrot on VC Medium articles and have it
write itself :-)

~~~
charlesju
lolz

------
andrewflnr
Ed: rm useless "bug" report.

oh lord.

> I believe that being more at peace in the present would have given me
> greater patience and ability to be more wordy in order to seem genuine?

A bot talking about how to seem more genuine. By being wordy, in an awkwardly
long sentence. The irony burns.
[https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv4C1NRdxJrut8qiuK_](https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv4C1NRdxJrut8qiuK_)

------
AWildC182
Best I can tell from the bot's output, I guess VCs just run around on twitter
doing nothing but providing inane drive-by commentary...

------
birracerveza
> Just read the article in the Financial Times said Silicon Valley's most
> valuable lesson is to focus on women attendees.

This is perfect.

------
tempsy
I didn't think any of the ones I saw made remote sense, as someone who follows
a decent # of VCs on Twitter...

------
jjohansson
“ Maybe in some niche B2B fields I don't know your people just randomly die in
your house while you are there.”

Amazing! Hahaha

------
wyldfire
> This will be one of the places technology is financed. But the future would
> be built somewhere else.

> But the software market is about to get a lot out of drug experimentation
> but I would recommend those who want to work will need to work.

Seems like overfitting a bit. But it's a super funny output.

------
uoaei
"In general, I think it's better to focus on everything else. How can we solve
this?"

------
andrewstuart
All this needs is $1 billion ready to invest and seriously it's exactly the
same as any other VC.

------
tomatotomato37
A tweet with 26 separate inspirations: "Would love to hear a solution."
([https://www.parrot.vc/-Luic4DYDS2sZZwQD5L-](https://www.parrot.vc/-Luic4DYDS2sZZwQD5L-))

I feel like there are multiple layers to this

------
johnsoft
> I don't think users will choose cross-platform over performance.

I've got bad news for you…

------
taigeair
"I am now racking my brain to recall where I used to be a dissenter of highly
remote teams. No more."

[https://www.parrot.vc/-LukH2OpIjNi3PhhChNI](https://www.parrot.vc/-LukH2OpIjNi3PhhChNI)

------
NoodleIncident
"I have nothing to do with startups but everything to do with my original
statement."

[https://www.parrot.vc/-LumCfM7z4sQiNiXMJIU](https://www.parrot.vc/-LumCfM7z4sQiNiXMJIU)

~~~
quaquaqua1
Mmmm, a time where I can appreciate recursion

------
AdamTReineke
Overtrained? This one just shows a snippet from the 3rd credited author.
[https://www.parrot.vc/-LuiS-9VuUs2-2aAPVKy](https://www.parrot.vc/-LuiS-9VuUs2-2aAPVKy)

------
kccqzy
> Good news to wake up to the fact that ISAs without safeguards are naturally
> regressive.

Hmm. Very interesting. Maybe we should in fact have more exceptions in the ISA
and let there be more context switches to the kernel.

------
voidhorse
« Yes. The solution is not to be best at XY & Z, it's to continue to build a
list of VC’s who are “next level” value add. »

This one was especially rich since it points to the genrator’s oncoming
sentinence

------
manmeetsg
This is great! Super similar to a project I put out 2 months ago:
[https://twitter.com/vctweetbot](https://twitter.com/vctweetbot)

~~~
manmeetsg
Documentation here:
[https://manmeet.substack.com/p/vctweetbot](https://manmeet.substack.com/p/vctweetbot)

------
ummonk
How did you train it? Adversarial neural network? Markov chain?

------
WMCRUN
Two favorites:

“Billionaires" has nothing to do with those who can’t graduate to higher wage
jobs from that starting point.

50% of millennials want to be heard and appreciated.

------
sdegutis
> You might want to go to work tomorrow, so...

That _suspense_...

------
KhoomeiK
> "if you have a 1000X returner, then that is still pretty good. VC is
> asymmetric. You don't try to get 9 out of 10."

Vaguely meaningful.

------
XorNot
I want to set this up as a chat-bot and have it randomly dispense wisdom in
the main channel.

------
anshublog
"Ever since I left Facebook board, I have become convinced its the new
diabetes."

(Ok, I wrote that.)

------
jszymborski
"Income inequality is an enormous problem. What do you use it for?"

Some of this stuff is gold

------
metasj
Now train a second bot on parrot.vc advice to make bets via MicroVentures...

~~~
nloui
Perfect - starting the AngelList syndicate right now. Haha

------
edoceo
How can I hire this person?

------
rogerkirkness
> "Industrial farming is one of the days for me."

\- Jack Dorsey (?)

------
rolltiide
I wish this thing would close its quotes and parenthesis

------
themattress
> Haha “I have a hard stop” is a great alternative to DUI.

Truth

------
branon
what is a VC?

> Canceling sneaky charges is one of the most predictable but consequential
> developments of the 2020s.

this is pretty cool.

~~~
wtracy
Venture capitalist. Someone who invests in startups.

------
HenriNext
No, it didn't become VC, because it ain't giving me any moneys.

I even said "AI" and refreshed my bank account balance, but still nothing.

------
solso
works well, it would have fooled me. The quotes are as bizarre as the real
ones :-)

------
ykevinator
This is excellent.

------
zitterbewegung
How does it work?

~~~
nloui
It's a markov chain trained on around 65,000 tweets from around 50 VC's.

~~~
minimaxir
You _really_ need to say that explicitly somewhere. The "I forced a bot"
phrasing used in the current HN title is a clickbait trope that's not
applicable here, and those "I forced a bot" scripts from Keaton Patti have
spread misinformation on how AI text-generation works.

------
bencollier49
Ooh, this is interesting. Were all the VCs you used from outside the EU?
Because this seems to contain personal data, names etc. and raises the
interesting question of the compatibility of some ML with GDPR.

------
allovernow
Just to clarify, does VC stand for Venture Capitalist in this context?

~~~
nloui
Yep!

------
paulgrahamisvc
So lots of people in this thread that realize vcs are supercilious talking
heads. Why does Paul graham, the blogger who claimed Microsoft is dead and
that lisp , which btw is untyped and slower than maybe even Go, is a
competitive badvantage get admiration? Is it just by the wannabes?

~~~
tomhoward
Lisp was a competitive advantage for the company that made him rich in the
mid-90s. He wouldn't claim it is for a new company starting out now. He later
wrote that Python and Ruby were a competitive advantage. They wouldn't be now.
But other languages/platforms are. His claim wasn't that Lisp is and will
always be a competitive advantage, but that at any time, there is a powerful
platform available that few developers/companies have embraced yet, but that
could be a competitive advantage to a company that does.

As for Microsoft, it still is dead in the sense that he articulated in that
essay; it doesn't offer any novel/powerful/ubiquitous platforms that new
companies could or should build new products/companies on. It barely exists as
a mobile platform, nobody has built significant new companies out of Windows
desktop software in years, and its cloud platform is just one of several, and
far from the biggest/best. He never said it would go out of business, just
that it would become a generic BigCo, which is exactly what it is.

He also built a new type of investment company that invested in Airbnb,
Dropbox, Twitch, Stripe and many other new startups, before any other VC would
look at them, and at a tiny fraction of the valuation that other VCs would
invest at. That investment model he pioneered has since been imitated
countless times around the world - unsuccessfully, in most cases, because he
did such a good job that others couldn't seriously compete.

With all that said, I think there's plenty he's been wrong about, but he's
been right about the most important stuff, and deserves admiration for that.

