
Operating Manual for VC Firm Bloomberg Beta - pravj
https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Manual
======
chrisaycock
One of their investment paths is "Beacon":

> _We believe that there are exceptional individuals with great ideas who
> likely have the skills to build a company but lack the network or personal
> financial means to get started. So we will invest a small amount of capital
> -- $50K (for roughly 2% of the startup idea you pursue) -- to support very,
> very early-stage founders explore an idea, validate a key hypothesis, or
> build an early prototype._

[https://github.com/Bloomberg-
Beta/Manual/blob/master/1%20-%2...](https://github.com/Bloomberg-
Beta/Manual/blob/master/1%20-%20Manual.md#beacon)

~~~
sidlls
Just a hunch, but it's likely something close to 100% of said individuals will
have a (pre-existing, not a result of reaching out specifically for this
investment) network to connect them the "right way" for the money. That's just
the way this industry works. It's exceptionally rare for someone without
connections to make any headway.

~~~
mchristen
They pretty much say that in this document.

> If we don’t know you ourselves, we prefer if someone we trust knows you.

~~~
jkuria
I believe Marc Andreessen has said the same thing in the past. When he was
accused of elitism, he said:

"That is my test of whether this person is a true entrepreneur. If they are,
they will find a way, by hook or crook, to get to someone who knows me"

~~~
sidlls
What's _not_ elitist about that statement?

~~~
CamperBob2
I think what he's saying is, if that stops you, you weren't going to get very
far anyway.

It will obviously be easier to draw Marc's attention from a high socioeconomic
stratum, but as a VC it's not in his interest to make it completely impossible
for anyone. At least that's the way I read it.

------
bhl
It'd be nice if a majority of websites were exposed like this: if you wanted
to save an article or blog-post for example, you could just fork it into a
repository. What's saved is just the original text, or anything that has a
flat representation. Then you could edit and re-publish with changes; I think
this is more in align with how knowledge works, sort of an implicit graph with
splits and merges.

The basic idea is to separate the content from how it's rendered (html, css,
js). How content is rendered can be a repo-by-repo decision. Benefits of this
is better portability of data and easier way to organize things on the
internet: you wouldn't have to web-scrape with some type of dom parsing
heuristic library since the content is readily accessible.

It's also feasible in implementation: plenty of people are publishing via
Github pages and Jekyll; I just haven't seen the ability to fork posts yet.
Bloomberg Beta definitely could've done this for their website.

------
csomar
Even better, they do share templates of some (I guess) of the legal documents:
[https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Investment-
Documents](https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Investment-Documents)

Very useful if you are into that stuff.

------
goog84329
The average investment of $500,000 is way too small IMO. That's less than the
salary of one L5 (or L6?) engineer at Google.

~~~
lmeyerov
1\. 100% - FANG employees are indeed known as potential bad fits for early
stage startups! Beyond asking for salaries multiples over international norms,
which many teams are better off hiring vs 1 FANG type, they also often risk
needing to overcome other critical bigco weaknesses: unready for the ups-and-
downs, weird tooling, used to large org support in tools and distribution,
must unlearn prioritizing tech / scale / reliability over hustle & iteration,
and more. Startups may be a big leap for you and too much of a cultural
mismatch. Which is OK! RSUs are great and you'll do fine, and good to realize
now what it means to take a leap! If this is too much, equity shiftz to salary
by Series A / B, and a few co's raise a lot in seed so already do that
dilution trade off.

2\. 500k is a lot for pre-seed and fine for the common case of a 1-5M seed
party round, which is generally 1-2 leads + various smaller checks.
Interestingly, w/ softbank floundering and us economy prepping for a
recession, I expect seed rounds to back down -- current is 2-5X over just
5-10yr ago.

(Disclaimer: founder that works with them and has to think about this stuff
professionally)

------
buboard
kind of funny that they all have twitter and linkedin links, but no github

------
Niyblinkz
Connection is always needed to progress

------
gist
> We've moved our entire web presence to GitHub to become even more
> transparent. Here, you can see how things have changed over time, propose
> improvements, or even take our ideas and make them your own..

Sorry but to me this is screwy. Why do I have to spend time navigating github
to find basic info about the firm if I am just curious? Why is it beneficial
or implied that anyone who is anyone knows the secret handshake of finding
what they need by finding it in this manner? Why is it not possible to have
transparency with a 'normal' website and then if there is a reason point
people to github?

From wikipedia:

"Bloomberg Beta consists of six full-time employees: Roy Bahat, Karin Klein,
James Cham, Shivon Zillis, Morgan Polotan and Shaina Conners. Bahat was
previously the President of IGN Entertainment and was the chairman of Ouya
Inc. until June 2015."

The github site says nothing about who these people are either. Sorry they are
not 'well known enough' to present this way. This is not 'everyone knows who
Bill Gates is'.

Example: [https://github.com/KarinK](https://github.com/KarinK)

This is not transparency it is the opposite.

~~~
duaoebg
They're part of an insider club, if you're an insider you'll know who they
are.

These are the kind of people wear their graduation rings upside down so you'll
feel the chunk of metal in the handshake.

~~~
t0ughcritic
If we don’t known them, we need to get in touch with people they may know. who
we most likely don’t know either, esp if the circle is small and keeps helping
friends of theirs.

