

Don't talk about VCs - smacktoward
http://scripting.com/stories/2012/07/15/dontTalkAboutVcs.html

======
marcusf
May be tangential, but I've been reading Dave Winer off and on for several
years, and I always have such a hard time figuring out why he feels so
slighted? Either he suffers from a serious martyr complex, there's a grand
conspiracy going around to hinder his greatness from blooming or I've simply
never grown accustomed to his slightly boastful writing (seriously, the ratio
of blog posts where he mentions he invented RSS should be the basis for a
measure like the Winer Self-Aggrandizement Index or WSAI).

------
tptacek
_One of the unwritten rules of tech blogging is that you don't write about
VCs. Or if you absolutely must, if it's unavoidable, it's always in glowing
terms._

Do I live in some weird insulated pocket of the Internet, or is this a
narrative Winer has just invented for himself to occupy? Or does "Tech
blogger" have a different meaning to him?

~~~
michaelochurch
I think his definition of "tech blogger" includes "...who wants VC investment
in the future."

~~~
tptacek
How many people have ever not gotten a VC investment because of the way they
wrote about VCs? If the numbers make sense to them, VCs will invest. If
anything, from how I understand it, VCs use social signals in exactly the
opposite direction: people who are overly nice to them are not alphas.

~~~
michaelochurch
Well, I don't think that the OP is advising people never to write "about VCs"
so much as he's commenting on the groupthink and tendency to protect their own
and remarking that, therefore, a person who exposes one bad apple will offend
them all. I've heard of people having trouble raising money because they blew
whistles on unethical VC practices from unrelated investors. The problem is
that VCs all talk to each other and compare notes far beyond what any
reasonable person would consider appropriate.

~~~
tptacek
I'm using this comment to again dispute the idea that writing nice things
about VCs will help you score a round, or that writing mean things about them
will prevent you from doing that. They certainly do compare notes, but they're
way more afraid of losing out on a good deal (remember: one good outcome pays
for much of the portfolio) than they are interested in swinging their dicks.

They're comparing notes to see if the others in herd view the company as an
alpha. Not to blackball people who write negative things about VCs in the
abstract.

~~~
slurgfest
Job-seekers are always advised not to be negative about past employers. In
other situations it is considered prudent to avoid this kind of talk, and I
think it is strongly against norms of American business.

I am sure that most of the best classical artists had to watch their tongues
around patrons.

So I'm interested to know: how is it really different with VCs?

~~~
tptacek
The VC/company relationship is really not at all like an employer/employee
relationship.

It would probably be very bad form and inadvisable to write something nasty
about a VC you had worked with directly.

But otherwise, we're talking about what is by necessity a highly mercenary
part of the market.

~~~
andyl
"The VC/company relationship is really not at all like an employer/employee
relationship."

They can fire you, and you can't fire them. That means you are the employee,
and they are the employer. If everything goes great, you'll never have to put
that relationship to the test. But things don't always go great...

~~~
tptacek
If you're an early stage company, the pre-revenue kind that we tend to think
about when we talk about VCs on HN, the VC is buying a stake in 2-4 years of
your output when they invest in you. Sure, they can "fire" you, in the sense
that they often have the ability to vote you out of the company you founded,
but this is usually a loss for them, not a win; they staked you, and you end
up walking.

Anyways, the number of instances we can cite of a VC removing an officer of a
company because they were discovered to have written mean things about VC in
the abstract is... let me go out on a limb here...

------
staunch
Virtually every great tech company was built with the help of VCs. Google,
Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Yelp, etc.

The alternatives to these companies winning was not an open solution run by a
co-op of hippies. The alternative was some shittier solution by Microsoft,
MySpace, Yahoo, or even nothing at all.

It really might be nicer if The Search Engine (Google), The Message
Broadcasting Platform (Twitter), The Social Platform (Facebook) were NOT run
by private companies, with all their faults and biases. It would be better for
the world if every person and company could build on them in a completely
competitive and fair way. We would get better stuff.

It just doesn't seem to work out that way. Either people aren't motivated to
do it or it's not possible. Whatever the case it's just not how things work
(for now).

Given the way it does work VCs contribute in a very important way. Their
effect seems to be purely additive. They don't _prevent_ anyone from
succeeding by alternative means.

Mitt Romney seems like a very different kind of VC than helped tech companies.
He handled much later stage stuff (IIRC), making him more of an investment
banker type.

------
michaelochurch
I don't have any reason to like or dislike VCs on personal experience. The
ones I've met randomly (e.g. running in Central Park) seem to be nice enough,
and I'm sure that a lot of them are good. But VC-istan is full of deeply
unethical people (those I have met, unfortunately) who don't deserve to be
funded and I can't believe that the VCs aren't aware of what these people are
doing. VCs need to stop funding unethical people, who get money just because
they're well-connected, outright. Plus there are horrors like multiple
liquidation preferences, which exist to reassert the social superiority of the
VCs and leave me feeling it wouldn't be so bad if VC-Istan disappeared.
Technology doesn't need it.

------
monochromatic
> like the American workers who Romney's tactics cost their jobs and pensions

Wait, what??

