
The End of My VC Career - ilghiro
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/the-end-of-my-vc-career/
======
tptacek
There's not much of interest in this story. Glaenzer was caught, by police
witnesses, sexually assaulting a woman in a London train. He was convicted. He
retained his role at the VC firm he cofounded for several years, but
discovered that institutional investors --- the people who fund VC funds ---
were unwilling to allocate capital to a firm that included Glaenzer. He left
the firm.

The job of a VC partner is about trust, judgement, and persuasion. Flagrant
violations by partners redound to the reputation of the whole firm. When you
understand just what it is a VC firm is, how they're essentially middlemen
simultaneously pitching themselves to operators and to capital, it becomes
clear how important reputation is. Really, it's _all there is_. Without it,
you can't do the job.

~~~
cpach
Indeed. Seems like a pretty clear-cut case to me.

------
leggomylibro
This is a complex topic, but it seems like there are a couple of questions
about the character of people who work in executive roles which _should_
fundamentally matter in due diligence discussions.

Do they implicitly respect the agency of others? Do they see people as
individuals with their own goals and the fundamental right to decide what
those goals are?

These people make a lot of decisions on behalf of others, and I believe that
asking those questions isn't that far off from asking: can you trust them to
act in the interests of their employees, clients, and customers? Or at the
very least, are they likely to have some sense of fiduciary duty towards the
people who they agree to perform work for?

So, from my perspective, "a private mistake which we all agree was not
business-related" sounds...well I don't know the right word, but who is 'we'
in that phrase?

And I don't know which institutional investor balked at the fund based on the
perceived character of its decision-makers, but I appreciate that they
considered that angle in their process.

~~~
tptacek
I thought "private mistake" was an extremely weird argument, too. It can't
possibly be right; any of us can think of "private" crimes that would preclude
someone's continued involvement with a VC firm. So, really, the implied
argument he's making is that sexual assault is some kind of lesser crime.

~~~
ScottBurson
I read it as drawing a distinction between sexual assault committed against
someone with whom the firm has an actual or potential business relationship
(e.g. hitting on a founder when she pitches you) vs. one committed against
someone with no such connection. Certainly the law would not distinguish these
two — I didn't read him as suggesting that — but one's business associates
might.

------
brighteyes
> I suggest that by remaining in his position he took very few consequences,
> and that in almost any other walk of life a person with less privilege would
> automatically lose their job after being convicted of sexual assault.

Is this actually true? If, as a random example, a waiter in a restaurant were
convicted of sexual assault on the subway (as in the story here), how would
the owner of the restaurant even know about it to fire him?

I think things work exactly the opposite of how the author of this piece does.
The person under question here had his career end because he was famous in his
field. But 99% of people are not famous. Rather than "privilege" shielding
him, being rich and famous was his downfall.

~~~
lainga
Through the increasingly popular (and unreliable, and hard-to-dispute)
background check service that SV has created.

[https://checkr.com/](https://checkr.com/)

~~~
codingdave
Background checks have been around for a long time, and a new service has
little to do with their availability to employers. The actual answer as to how
an employer would know if their employee had gotten in legal trouble is the
time they would miss as they got arrested, jailed, bailed, and then worked
through the legal process.

~~~
brighteyes
Being jailed or otherwise detained for any amount of time, sure. But
otherwise, working through the legal process wouldn't be something a regular
employer knows about. You would have more errands to run than usual perhaps,
that's about it.

Another example: as a programmer, if I run into legal trouble with the IRS and
they sue me, or if my neighbor sues me for damage to their property, how would
my employer know?

(I'm not saying it's good that employers might not know this. I'm just baffled
by the article taking it as a given that practically all employers would.)

------
endlessvoid94
This is the kind of article that makes me want to go into the mountains for a
week.

~~~
bob_theslob646
Ik this article was so poorly written, even the format for an interview was
not there.

------
draw_down
Actions have consequences.

