And that’s the problem. You find the same traits they claim that made them successful by those who failed.
Cherrypicking the winners creates a false reasoning of success.
I may be paranoid but only run my ai cli tools in a vps only. I have them installed locally but never use them. In a vps I go full yolo mode bc I do not care about it. It is a slightly more cumbersome workload, bit if you have a dev + staging envs, then you never have to develop and run stuff locally, which brings the local hardware requirements and costs down too (bc you can develop with a base macbook neo).
It also requires some ideological bubble where people care too much what other people know and think.
Otherwise someone would never bother that kind of an educational talk with a stranger.
I played kind of the same thing a little while ago. I and a friend wanted to watch a movie, "Blast of Silence" it was called. We met in the bar two people, one of them I knew, the other one asked what we were about to watch, I answered "Blast of Silence", pronouncing it completely wrong (our mother tongue is some sort of German), she thought I made a joke and I told her with a completely straight face that I didn't learn English in school as I was going to a very basic school. I had to completely rely on the subtitles. She was a little bit embarrassed to have brought it up. moral of the story: you have to play dumb convincingly then you can have a little bit of fun
Yes, it is, and that's the irony, making it meta, which makes it the very kind of pretentious bullshit it is critiquing, which makes it brilliant, which also makes it bullshit, which is amusing. It's great satire.
A version of this I've experienced before is when someone's trying to "pill" you on some ideology that you've already examined and tossed aside. They keep trying to educate you on it. Like the problem is you don't get it. You can't even get across that no, in fact, you do get it, and you don't accept it.
Someone should make a site for literature, music, art, etc. that uses a filter to exclude anything from New York.
I mean it's not like everything from New York is bad, but even the good stuff there is eclipsed by the sheer volume and assumed gravitas of pretentious crap. (Apparently there's now a whole scene there of right-wing pretentious crap too, so this is by no means a political dig.)
It'd be kind of like Kagi's "small web" switch. Show me the great painter of incredibly moving scenes in some college town in Michigan who lives in a borderline squat and can't pay her bills or the indie hillbilly trip-hop crossover band in Oklahoma doing something original and actually good.
The net was supposed to be all about this but algorithms have kind of ruined it by algorithmically promoting attention bait, like an automated version of the pretentious gravitas machine but with even worse taste.
That would be amazing. Idk if you're hating on NYC but yeah, artists go there for career exposure so it would be interesting to somehow gain easy access to all of those who haven't sought exposure through the main institutional channels
I'm not really hating on NYC so much as the pretentious gravitas machine that seems to be permanently stuck on early-mid 20th century avant garde tropes and derivatives of them. There just happens to be a crapload of that in New York, and a ton of people who want to be in and around that scene, so much so that an anti-NYC filter would be useful.
Years ago I lived in a little town called Asheville, NC. I've heard it's not as good as it used to be but back then... the sheer number of unbelievable artists that nobody had ever heard of and were living at or near poverty was staggering. I miss strolling through downtown and stopping into galleries and routinely seeing pieces that were moving. I really wish I'd collected more of it or at least taken notes and written down names. The place was also covered in graffiti far more interesting and clever than most of Banksy. I photographed a little of it. Should have photographed more.
Apparently there's a number of small towns and medium sized cities with concentrations like this, because seldom can artists genuinely committed to their own visions afford to live in a place like NYC. The reason you saw a lot of genuinely innovative art there once was that it was cheap because it was dirty and crime-ridden. Now people like that go to little towns, medium sized cities in the interior, and the middle of nowhere.
I do think going to NYC can be actively harmful though... there's been two musicians I genuinely loved who made incredible original visionary stuff in places like Ann Arbor MI and Mississippi and then moved to NYC and their stuff became dull atonal ambient click-noise junk. Cause that's avant garde, I guess.
Tangentially...
I've heard there is now a quietly but explicitly well-funded detachment of far-right and "alt-right" New Yorker artists and intellectuals making right-wing coded pretentious crap. (Most pretentious crap is left-coded but it does not have to be.) Maybe this is what will finally kill the thing I'm talking about.
I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities.
A lot of people with a lot of money at risk got really scared and decided the easiest thing to do was to go back to the status quo.
The incongruent part of that theory is that the RTO push came from middle to upper-middle management (and some top-level ones on occasion).
The owners of commercial real estate are not these people. And it doesn't seem likely that these commercial real estate owners would have sufficient push by themselves to make such a large scale RTO mandate.
It came from the very top. The owners own both real estate companies and software companies and much in between. Many also copied the RTO directive to fit in.
>I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities.
That makes as much sense as "people buy iPhones because they own Apple shares in their 401k (it's #2 in the S&P 500) and want to pump the stock". At an individual CEO level it doesn't make sense, for similar reasons. The CEO and the company can reap massive savings from not leasing an office, which is presumably also good for their careers and make the board happy. On the other hand the individual benefit that the CEO can get by ever so slightly increasing demand for CRE is negligible.
Those CEOs don't exist in isolation. There are boards of directors. Most tech companies have additional VC funding. The biggest myth of modern business is that the CEO is the boss. They're not. They're more often the person entrusted to curate the company which is ultimately for the interests of those who own it.
And those people own other things too. Sometimes they own commercial real estate directly. Sometimes they're just investing in it. But they all rub elbows with those who do own it. They sit on boards together. They have common interests and let me tell you -- those interests ain't about what's good for you and me.
Yep watch the economic forums if you want to get an insight into how these people think. They will absolutely be excited about AI but be a B2B SaaS that sells by the seat. They will move against their own interests if it in the pursuit of the next quarter regardless of long-term though.
There were a lot of downstream effects as well -- local businesses that depended upon those office workers being in the area. Those ripples hurt a lot of people.
That said, it shouldn't be the driver of RTO, it should be the need to actually have in-person collaboration.
A win-win in this regard would be to repurpose the empty office space into living spaces so that the local businesses would have local people and those tenants would be able to possibly abandon the need for car ownership if the density of the area fosters all the necessary services.
The smackdown of this idea is that office spaces have different requirements than living spaces and the conversion of those buildings is too expensive to make it viable. As an unrepentant optimist, I would hope that could be mitigated by supporting those transitions via tax rebates, collaborative zoning and permitting processes, and investing in methodologies that could address the infra needs (plumbing, etc).
Assuming this is an issue only in America is absolutely adorable. Signed, from Europe. In Austria a lot of corporations are overly generous if they give you 2-3 day/week WFH.
I struggle to understand the psychology of how founders who are clearly incompetent charlatans get second+ chances -- they couldn't do fraud successfully but investors have a faith they could do business successfully. But they still get funding (like adam neumann of wework fame) and full on "narrative tongue baths" by the business media community (like this wsj article on trevor milton).
Why? I struggle to understand the incentives + motivations here.
This was the lesson from the Fyre Festival debacle. Most of his inside partners and enablers knew he wasn’t likely to succeed. They just saw an opportunity to benefits themselves and made sure their own risk was limited.
In return, he got to trade on their reputation which allowed him to rope in more respectable partners and appear more legitimateto potential customers. It’s a vicious cycle.
Whan I go to the Stacioners, I ever aske for mitigated Gal and meteoric Iron fillings. I fynde that it maketh the derkest and most persistente inke. Make sure that thou onlie bye swan quill, not goose, and specifie that they sholde onlie be from the right-handed wing.
The past failure is in the abstract, and in the past. And anyway, they were unfairly maligned. There is an inside version of the story that they will be happy to tell you, which was clearly not their fault.
But that is neither here nor there. What is important is the now, and in the now you are in the presence of someone who is Good At Making Money. And you too, by joining forces, will be Making Lots Of Money with this charismatic person, who can clearly achieve great things and will be clearly avoiding any past missteps that may have caused their downfall right before reaching greatness (but weren’t their fault anyway).
I took as beyond sarcasm, just a simple explanation of how they manage to keep going written in the first person. From my perspective it is incredible anybody could misunderstand.
That's how I took it too, and didn't realize someone might read it otherwise, but I can see how it could be misunderstood if someone isn't paying as much attention.
There is no tone of voice in writing. This is part of the problem with written social media. Some writers will say "only an idiot would believe what I wrote", showing themselves to be adversarial in their communications. I don't think that's you in this case.
It's hard for me to tell because I've seen this multiple times in my career (in tech). People wasting investors' money getting funding over and over while those actually building stuff get suppressed.
I swear there are some people who control a lot of money who are just having fun ruining people's lives for laughs.
There are people who spend years working for some company, betting their career on it but it turns out the whole thing was some kind of inside joke.
My view is that some companies are basically somebody's toy and the employees are part of the entertainment like a personal reality TV show for some rich person so they can play-act as a hotshot entrepreneur.
Probably it serves as some kind of inflation control mechanism. If you have a lot of money and want to spend it without driving inflation, you have to find things with extreme diminishing returns and you have to invest in people who value such things.
The only thing I can add (regarding the motivations of people willing to invest with a fraudster) is that many people invest with the belief that they'll make money because they are just part of the scam and they assume there's a greater fool somewhere down the line.
The reason for this is the same as why real estate is so expensive and the price of gold is so high. There is far too much capital accumulation among the ultra-wealthy, who don’t know what to do with all that money. The expertise of someone like this founder lies simply in recognizing that this is the case and that it can be monetized.
There was a great Money Stuff blurb about that w/r/t Adam Neumann. I can't find it to quote it directly, but the gist was that if you disabuse yourself of the notion that Neumann was playing a game of entrepreneurship and good-faith empire building, and instead conclude that the game he was playing was shameless capital extraction, every step and action he took suddenly makes sense.
The truly amazing thing, especially the second time around, are the supposedly sophisticated investors who fall for it. "Oh, he's learned his lesson -- he won't do it again!".
Some of those sophisticated investors are also engaged in shameless capital extraction. Their investment thesis is based on the "Greater Fool Theory": they're gambling that they can dump the inflated assets on another bag holder before it blows up.
> ...if you disabuse yourself of the notion that Neumann was playing a game of entrepreneurship and good-faith empire building, and instead conclude that the game he was playing was shameless capital extraction, every step and action he took suddenly makes sense.
Sort of. I get the capital extraction part, but you also need to be a good steward of capital and make a profitable business out of it. He failed badly at the later part, and his reputation is an obstacle for the former.
Not saying you are wrong, but if I am a "capital allocator" at a16z, he would be no-go.
IMO you're being unfair; he talked his way into getting paid half a billion dollars for wework, and he's now a billionaire. That's a massive success at capital extraction.
This is too cynical for even a turbo cynic like me.
Basically, you’re saying he mislead investors and got a bunch of money, so those investors see themselves being ripped off as a valuable skill, so they invest in him again. Wut?
I say again — why would investors trust him if his only track record is losing investor money?
I misinterpreted you; I was arguing that he's already succeeded completely, so it doesn't matter if anyone gives him more money.
But, IMO the reason they're still giving him more money is that they're stupid and greedy. They know WeWork was a disaster, but it was a huge disaster. That shows them he's good at running a con, and they want to get in on the next one.
Class solidarity doesn't hurt either. Being a billionaire makes him an actual person in the eyes of other rich people.
EDIT: Also, it's funny you used a16z as an example:
> Not saying you are wrong, but if I am a "capital allocator" at a16z, he would be no-go.
because Andreesen Horowitz are the ones investing in his new WeWork 2.0 startup Flow.
If you know he is good at duping investors then you know he is good at gaining investors, and if you think you will be able to well time your exit you will make a shit ton of money off the other investor's investment. Many investors are just straight up gamblers and risk is just part of the game.
Its like people who invest into a ponzi scheme knowing full well it is a ponzi scheme, just thinking they are smart enough to leave before it all comes crashing down. And once you get enough critical mass, other people will invest based entirely on the fact that there is a lot of other investors and a rising price.
It's distribution. Guy's got a brand name now. People and investors recognize his name. It's a lot easier to find an absolute quantity N of investor money for a fraudulent but well-known name than it is for an unknown upstart.
The fraud might have a low close rate but the top of the funnel is huge. The unknown upstart can't even get meetings.
Charisma and connections are pretty much all it takes. Really only connections are needed but since these people are coming back from being exposed they need charisma to assuage the concerns of their connections.
I remember listening to a podcast (possibly complex systems?) that said the best way to find what kinds of frauds are out there is by looking at what known fraudsters are up to.
I recently invested a small amount of money in an early stage company where I had to declare I was either a 'high net worth individual' or a 'sophisticated investor'. The mutually exclusive clause seemed important to me.
The type of person who funders fall for is a personality type. That they have failed in the past doesn't matter, they fall in love anyway. This time is different.
Venture guys aren't as smart or analytical as their propaganda would lead one to believe. A lot of them are just people who got lucky once.
A lot of companies are currently doing what (if you squint) Holmes was claiming Theranos would be able to do a decade ago. I agree with you that this is enough for her to claim, plausibly to some, that she was basically on the right track.
SBF, similarly, happened to have FTX invest in Anthropic early, and while we don't know how that's gonna play out now that they're at odds with the DoW, the value of Anthropic has already increased enough that it would have made whole all the money he was wasting/embezzling, so there's going to be a path for people to claim that he's directionally worth investing more money in, if he's out anytime soon.
> SyberJet’s own history shows the challenges. Over the past 40 years, an eclectic mix of financiers from Dubai to Taiwan invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing the plane maker’s lightweight business jets. But in all that time just four planes made it into the hands of customers.
Putting two and two together it seems to me that this business is a front for money laundering or something.
A lot of the investors are also bullshitters so they like bullshitting founders. I see a similar thing in companies. People wonder why people who don’t produce much but are politically savvy are moving up. The answer that most leadership is the same so they recognize each other.
These fraudsters who get second chances have got blackmail. Trust me, all the people we see in the media are sharks. They only help each other if they feel a threat or have something to gain.
Like it or not these people know how to contact people who hand out money. That is really the skill in the VC world, not competence in some domain. It is a fundraising job. It takes charisma. Just got to keep the music going until you cash out. How many founders are actually trying to make a company last 100+ years, vs securing retirable wealth early in life?
My guess is that they're good talkers. They make it sounds like they learned their lesson or were framed but regardless if you hire them they'll make you rich!
Because those investors have exactly same moral and ethical framework. The fraud is just another legitimate way to make money to them. It is the same thing with Epstein or meetoo ... they were actually fine with all that and whoever complains is just pesky idiot.
Look how many people couldn't care about Epstein and the fact he was a convicted sex offender. Bill Gates didn't care and he was literally the richest person in the world at one point.
The rich VCs and billionaires and aspirational billionaires only care about doing what they want to do and don't care what the peons like us think or care about.
They are charismatic. They know how to work people.
If you've ever worked with narcissists and sociopaths, you'll soon enough discover that they will do anything to get what they want. And they are professionals at playing people.
They know what to say, how to present themselves, how to make their story, and what strings to pull on the people they try to convince.
Some investors are also willing to suspend their disbelief - thinking that if they are the first to ditch to bag, there's money to be made...as long as they're not the ones holding the bag.
not speaking for upwards failures in general, but for the extraordinary cases of convicted frauds being pardoned, the incentives are:
1. his $1.8M donation to Trump shows other felons and fraudsters that paying Trump will pay back in dividends (Trump profits)
2. By pardoning thousands of frauds, con artists and outright violent nazis (Jan 6), Trump builds himself an army of loyalists who owe him their lives
3. By putting pardoned frauds, con artists and violent nazis in charge of government functions, Trump replaces the entire US government with one that will do his personal bidding
To understand why you must understand the tax code. You can write off any investment losses. You can also recover losses if its from fraud. Though usually not fully. But you give 1 million for investment, boom its a fraud, and you get $800,000 back as opposed to keeping a million and paying $400,000 on it in taxes. It's a win-win situation. There is no penalty in betting on fraudsters. Whether this guy's schemes are deliberately for that is debatable. But on the flip side, putting downsides to investing on possible fraudsters considerably hinders any new genuine start up ideas from gaining investors.
> Milton and his wife had also donated at least $3.2 million to Trump’s 2024 election and to political groups and people in Trump’s orbit, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The problem with Trump is that his only values are centered around business and deal making. It's all about loyalty, not about truth. Clearly he doesn't have much tolerance for disagreement.
I can't take mark zuckerberg seriously anymore. He's made so many missteps recently: meta-verse, meta-glasses, llama, hiring wang, meta reality labs, etc.
He should probably hire a proper "number 2" (not someone political like sandberg) -- someone who "gets" the internet, like how he did when he was a harvard geek making a hot-or-not clone in his dorm room. I'm not sure acqui-hiring the moltbook founders is the move.
That being said, I think the one silver lining is that it seems like big-tech now has a willingness to hire people who actually ship things of value, like peter steinberger. Another nail in the coffin for leetcode, I hope.
He’s still making money out of adverts on Web 2.0 platforms. A lot of money. Clearly Zuck is a brilliant businessman. That does not mean he is a brilliant technologist. He doesn’t have to be, so long as he can keep making money.
Eventually there may be a big misstep, perhaps, something big enough to bring down the company. But he’s never come close to date. He’s so good at making money from ads that he can afford to keep burning cash on fruitless projects, hiring people that don’t deliver, building infrastructure he might not need. That’s a testament to his performance as a money maker.
Meta is an advertising machine. Not something I’d want to be associated with, but you cannot deny that he has built an incredible ad machine, probably the greatest ad machine ever built - whereas Google had to deliver sophisticated and costly tech to maintain their machine (maps, google search, gmail) meta’s only technical breakthrough has been to hyperscale a php website.
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