Yeah, I did barely cover the shift in dynamics around IPOs. I originally had a lot more on that, but cut a lot out. I think what you point out is absolutely a huge factor.
When you get caught stealing candy, saying 'look, he stole more than me!' doesn't work. Were you raised in a human society? I thought people learned these things when they were 7.
If you’re arguing he and I are the same thing, though he’s a VC and spends his time being a podcaster who advocates for the venture industry, and I’m someone who is talking about how power actually works in society, I proposed an easy test of your assertion. Let me know what results you find.
> and I’m someone who is talking about how power actually works in society
He also does this. That's... the entire point of the comparison.
Nice try. Shall we continue to where I start copy/pasting an LLM explaining it to you until you can't pretend to not understand any longer and move on to some other bad faith tactic? I want to see your most advanced bad faith attempt - deflection and playing dumb are for juniors. Show me something good.
I think “regular” VCs are one of the cohorts of people I feel worst for! I have a lot of friends who got into the business wanting to help entrepreneurs, and now they’re stuck on a cap table with folks who they’d never want to do business with. It’s not any different than the founders or employees who don’t want to be saddled with these guys, either.
The hard part is figuring out how to change these structures so that people can actually extract themselves and still build stuff that isn’t toxic and destructive.
I don't feel bad for VCs. Venture capital has turned the old style of startup entrepreneurship into a financial hustle of Startupism that is about trading equity value and not about venture creation. Maybe it always was about that, but at least in the 1960s-early 2010s it seemed at least somewhat more about business and value creation. Now it all just seems like a financial hustle. I hope we see VC become the minority way that businesses are built and financed as it used to be in the tech industry.
I think the root problem is it takes a lot more money and resources to compete now than it did before. Before, due to broadband being new, everyone not already having high performance computing devices, and the quickly decreasing costs of hardware, it was possible to use a skeleton crew and barebones resources to do something impactful. Or you have to be a very, very exceptional performer.
Since then, he also called for a pogrom against Romani people, in language that explicitly mirrored that which the Nazis used when calling for ethnic cleansing against the same group of people.
It's vice-signaling. They want to make sure that the industry knows that calling for a pogrom against the Romani people is the kind of malevolence that will be rewarded.
I think Wilhoit’s law[1] is also a major factor: these guys appear to have taken things like codes of conduct as a personal affront because in many cases it was the first time penalties started being applied to people they identified with as fellow in-group members. You can see this in lots of cases - e.g. compare SV elite reactions to the alleged shoplifting epidemic to the way the same people feel about cheating on taxes or misleading investors for orders of magnitude more money.
1. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition … There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect”
He was a genuinely good person, and a genuinely honest voice, in an industry that had very few back when he was one of its pioneers, and has far, far fewer of those things today. A lot of people will write nice words about Om, and he deserves them, but a lot of those people won't necessarily live the values that they admire about him, because that's a lot harder to do.
He was unfailingly kind, but he did not ever compromise on doing the right thing, or calling out moral failings. It's a wonderful tribute to him to see so many people talk about how Om supported them, or opened doors for them, or lifted up their careers; I think the thing we owe him is not just to carry that work forward, but to do it with the same character, conscience and consistency of principle that he did.
Shameless plug (as a board member): If you are interested in the book that this is from, a great way to pick it up is on the EFF website, where your purchase helps EFF keep up the fight for privacy. https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender
“This is a blog about how culture is made, continuously updated since 1999 for free, with no ads or trackers.”
Just the definition of cool for a nerd like me, you all are.
Anyone who is more employed than me, highly recommend finding a way to support the EFF! They have proven themselves to be a firewall between the way we want to live our lives online and countless antisocial attempts to make like seven people richer, etc..
I’ve volunteered with them before and it was great. Really felt like I was rolling up my sleeves and doing something (I went out and did interviews with small business owners about net neutrality years ago).
“For individuals like you and me, privacy is fundamentally for control—for giving us control over who can know what we do, where we do it, and who we do it with. In that way it is fundamental to our individual safety, dignity, and human rights.
But here’s the broader, less talked about thing that privacy is for—one that has animated my work for thirty years: privacy is a check on power.
Privacy limits the power of individuals over each other. It limits the power of governments over us. It also limits the power of corporations over us. Privacy allows people to protect themselves while creating a space to think, connect, communicate, share, and most critically, organize for change.”
Excerpt From Privacy's Defender, Cindy Cohn - hooked here just a few pages in
It's technically legal to take photos of people through their windows, but we don't worry about anybody but big tech creeps actually doing it on a regular basis.
It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every time people talk about their decisions and normalize anything that's not just having a monoculture where there are no competitive markets and monopolists control entire ecosystems, that's a good thing.
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