I mostly work on custom from scratch Linux operating systems and packages across dozens of languages.
I do 100% of my AI work today using two AMD r9700 pro GPUs on a 10yo pc I pulled out of an old arcade machine.
AI subscriptions only make sense for people who cannot build a basic home computer.
Most other founders/business owners and investors I know don’t see that as a controversial statement (that it makes no sense to see access to capital through a scarcity mindset, when it is factually accessible) but because most customers or potential employers aren’t one of those, it’s been a problem because this isn’t what you’re “supposed to do” and so they read into it from a social/legitimacy angle.
Regardless, it’s quite rewarding IMO and I highly suggest it to people with the means to pursue that path. I don’t see why people get so worked up on the whole VC thing, at the end of the day it’s just lending. Having dabbled in angel investing on the end you get a lot of people lining up for what they clearly perceive as unsecured loans or a social signal and on the other so many people get caught up in the dynamic of dangling said unsecured loans (when I first started it felt like some of the investors reaching out to me were just doing it to boss me around or something, like sir you can clearly see I started this two months ago and you dm’d me on LinkedIn to chat, I don’t need your money).
IMO most good founders/investors are credibility-maxxing but because of the social dynamics and moral hazards inherent with spending OPM you get weird other behavior
Yes, this is just called running a business.
We pull out the deck, he says "Do not need that. How many paying customers do you have?"
Given we were at MVP stage and were running a public sentiment analysis driven social media search engine using our published academic AI work (15 years ago) we said "None yet. The capital to build the paid portion of our product, which is popular, is why we are here."
As he eats his eggs he goes "Come back when you have a hundred or more paying customers" and sent us packing .
Not even a 5 minute interaction with people he asked to fly out to pitch him, and were not even allowed to pitch.
I expect rejection by default at an early stage, but that one was particularly mean.
It will forever remain my go to example of a meeting that could have been an email.
One excited investor we did find for another project ended up being the now famous con man "Michael Prozer" who got on who wants to marry a millionaire using forged bank records and proceeded to get actual capital based on this lie until he was arrested for fraud.
My opinion of VCs is still... recovering. The bar is in hell.
What’s probably dumb is that none of those questions/concerns were brought up ahead of time (by either side).
I don’t know if Angel investing groups are really still around like they were in there 2010s but the variance in the types of insanity and weirdness for those groups is really unmatched.
Oh man, I'm really sorry you had to go through that :'(.
I was invited and drove 3 hours. They then put you in a giant dining room with all the country club members eating dinner, with your own table by yourself. They tell you to order whatever you want, and wait there, and when the group is ready you'll be summoned to dance.
Anyway, whenever they are ready which was like an hour and a half, they call you in and you have to be ready.
While they loudly eat dessert you are supposed to walk around this 20' long table pitching them whatever you're doing and then you have to take questions from them, while still walking around a table. No presentation place, no place to sit, no real way to talk with everyone, you're always talking over someone's head.
Then they say thank you and on the way out you get a bill for whatever you ate.
That was one of the "nice" ones. There's tons of bullshit networks like TiE, Keiretsu forum, YoungPresidentsOrganization shit like that are all social clubs for wannabe oligarchs.
I think every Chinese backed firm on sand hill road at the time was a front for Chinese billionaires money laundering, I'm sure I have the giant spreadsheet of funds I talked to from 2016 that later turned out to be almost exactly that like Rothenberg Ventures.
The bad ones are LP's sexually assaulting people and being told to ignore it or that it's no big deal (I didn't ignore it and people got fired). Or when LPs push CEOs to fire more people than they need to, or to raise money through some shady vehicle to get it off the books. Not to mention seeing too many people that later were in the Panama/Epstein files.
Literally horrific
It's a bit crazy in hindsight that companies would have avoided investing, considering this is a space someone like Akamai occupied, and clearly there is value in this space. It's incredible to see how Cloudflare has grown over the years, kind of happy they grew as much as they did, a bit surprised by some of those VC nightmare scenarios.
My point is that it’s very very hard to know in advance that a startup is going to be awesome at marketing. Their tech was not, on its own, a giant moat or a “must have” standout. So I can see why some VCs shrugged.
In my experience, a more interesting friction is that VCs are pursuing a diversification strategy while founders are pursing a singleton strategy.
> You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser. That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me.
These fuckers are grotesque caricatures in human skin.
FWIW, while I think the comment makes much more sense in the context of that original video, I don't think Huang is making particularly good points in that interview. Like I thought the analogy with enriched uranium was a pretty good one, and at the very least Patel made exceedingly clear which points are analogous: namely, that it was powerful tech that had both civilian and military uses. That seems like a very fair discussion point when it comes to powerful chips. And Huang's response is just "Hey - that's a bad analogy", but I think his defense of it being a bad analogy is a poor one. Plus, I think it's false to say that Patel "betrayed a deep misunderstanding of technology" given that one quote he gave about why it would be a bad idea to sell advanced chips to China came from Dario Amodei of all people. I'm quite positive Amodei doesn't have "a deep misunderstanding of technology".
But back to the original topic, I still think it's beyond douchebaggery to make that quote your header in your Twitter bio, but it also fits with literally everything else I've heard from Andreessen to confirm to me he's far to the right on the psychopathy (i.e. "lacks empathy") spectrum. He's constantly dividing the world up into "winners" and "losers", and being a billionaire he's obviously a "winner", and if you propose any changes to society or regulations that would help lessen the naturally wealth-concentrating effects of technology then you're obviously a "loser".
I'd love to see/hear the words that people actually say when I hear stories like "they said they wouldn't [invest/buy/etc] from me because i'm a woman".
"1. A Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because he didn’t think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company. Seriously. "
"Young Global Leader '14. Co-founder, President + COO Cloudflare"
https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/2061794787825479818
Some QTs:
https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/2062768969560510486
https://x.com/typesfast/status/2062791307094048937
https://x.com/awxjack/status/2062605286683336757
Is it the money that makes them stupid or smth?
The other thing is it is maybe the most nepotistic industry out there. Which somewhat makes sense given the actual job is so relationship based.
how did unproven, fringe ideas get funded before the 1960s ?
you either took a loan, some rich patrons put some money or you were financed by vendor financing. most of these terms were not humiliation rituals. they were built on trust & knowing each other.
the bad & good were funded that way whether merchant expeditions, slavery, colonialism, steam engines.
you didn't have Venture capital. & soon enough venture capital will disappear altogether.
One might say why bootstrappers won't get erased too but they can carve out a specific market too small for AI companies to want to touch, and still remain sustainable rather than needing to make a ton of money; and pivoting as a venture backed company can be much harder as there are more people to please like investors and your employees which you likely have more of than a bootstrapper.
That does not match the definition of success here...the trick is to become a billionaire and call yourself an entrepreneur without ever turning a profit.... :-)
Then keep getting acquired, become a VC, do the same on and on.
Clouflare is an example as a loss making company, every single Musk company with the exception of his state subsided Tesla, Epic Games, Snap, DoorDash, WeWork, Rivian, Lucid, Peloton, Roblox, Wayfair, Lyft, Reddit, ...
Being a real business, and turning a profit, is very, very hard, you have Google, Amazon and a infinitesimal few...
The 4 people who spoke up were all fired on the same day 3 or 4 weeks later. 7 more quit shortly after - as soon as they got any decent offer. 6 months later about a quarter of the 20 were still with the company.
If you’re willing to fly halfway across the country just to talk to a VC in a diner, it signals a lot of desperation IMO.
I haven’t had a ton of interactions with VCs; however, I have read innumerable books about the VC world, and a recurring theme is that VCs are competitive and don’t like being left out of a deal / losing a deal to another VC.
By willing to fly so far away for nothing, it signals that no other VC is interested.
No matter how you look at it, if the only question was, "Do you have 100 customers?" then they could have sent and read that e-mail over breakfast.
I'll share a story, but its about a close friend and not me so I won't name any explicit actors and I'm going to round out the numbers. You either trust me or you don't, but this is a very direct relationship I have to both the founder and VC.
The story is this: the founder started their company outside of SV, so the lawyers weren't super familiar with startups and messed up the initial incorporation and stock plan stuff (actually super common: use Stripe Atlas or pay a startup-aware lawyer!). Went under the radar through years. This company ended up being bought for nearly $1B (with a B) after many rounds and a large board.
During the legal work to close the acquisition, they found out this messed up stock plan. Without going into the details, the effect was that instead of taking home $200M, the founder would take home ~$75M. The mistake the lawyer made almost a decade earlier was about to cost him $125M.
Most of the board basically said "too bad so sad, law is law." But one VC (the one I know, the one I'm talking about) basically strong armed and politicked the whole thing and eventually convinced everyone around the table to give up an equal share of their own holdings to make the founder whole.
Letter to the law: they didn't have to.
Spirit of being founder friendly: this VC went to bat hard and got everyone to yield to make things "right."
Also, look, you might argue $75M vs $200M is just "rich vs rich." Who cares? Sure. That's not the point.
You don't hear about stuff like this because honestly its not a big enough deal and feel good stories get way less clicks than pitchfork stories.
(I mention this so more people can know the list exists, and hopefully email hn@ycombinator.com when they see comments we should add.)
I feel as if basic Personal Integrity is now considered an anachronistic weakness, in the tech industry, and it's heartbreaking. I know that VCs can probably share similar stories [to the OP] about some of the people that pitched them, or their behavior, after getting funded.
Lotta ass, being shown, all around.
At some point in the future, I may consider smaller-scale (local) angel investing, but it seems like such an ugly field, not sure if I'll ever do it. I don't need the money; I would do it to help folks get a leg up.
It's unfortunate that some VCs I respected turned out to repeatedly have their reputation tarnished by such negative stories. I'm not sure what compels founders and VCs to be polarizing and not diplomatic like the old days.
Life's too short to screw people over - reputation is one of the few things that last after we're gone.
About 10 minutes into the pitch, she cut us off, and basically said -- as absolutely kindly as something like this can be directly said -- "I am not going to invest in this, and furthermore I don't think what you're trying to do is investible at all". Then she took a bunch of her time to run us through why, help us understand some very fundamental things about the VC world we didn't quite have right, and generally be brutal but extremely useful in us framing what we were trying to do.
She didn't have to do that. She could have nodded along and then given us a polite "no" like everyone else. She could have cut us off and given us a rude "no". But she didn't -- she made sure to use the time we had to help us as much as she could, even if she very adamantly was not going to invest.
Not a big gesture or anything, but kind and helpful. There's a lot of that. But it doesn't make headlines.
The VC landscape has changed a lot since some of these stories happened. Many years ago, there were few VCs and even good companies had a hard time getting funding. This created weird environments with some VCs raised funds and then liked having companies crawl to them to beg for the money.
There are still some VCs like that, but there has been an explosion of VC funds and money. Most VCs know they need to work hard to earn the trust of founders that they want to invest in. Leaving a bad impression could mean you're left out of the next round if you want it.
This goes against the popular idea of VCs, but most VCs I've worked with are actually pretty boring, normal, nice people.
https://voidzero.dev/posts/voidzero-cloudflare#acknowledgeme...
I've been meaning to write up my story with him. Now is a great time with all the horror stories on others that have been coming out.
He sticks through his companies for over a decade, which is rare in this business: https://x.com/ericvishria/status/2051459386372149506
I mean can you actually imagine the internal monologue of a guy like Sam Altman?
For example, if you go off with the cheating partner, don't expect it to not happen again
None of those "worst experiences" seem all that unusual to me (though nobody will say #1 out loud anymore until after they've invested), and #3 is completely in character for Vinod.
After all its just business decisions like Cloudflare recent layoffs no?
Of course to people like the author, it seems borderline sociopathic to casually suggest such levels of betrayal. It is like trying to get into the most exclusive nightclubs, and when you're finally in the front, the bouncer will look at the group and say "You can get in, but not those two". It sucks, but to the bouncer it is just business as usual, and you're just another face.
I get the business as usual analogy but the specifics of the interaction are different. You just showing up to your club with your friends is different than having equity in a company you cofounded.
Or buy $2400 of GPU today to get you something close to get you within 10% of Opus 4.6 on coding benchmarks, that pays for itself in 1 year, AND you can work with private code and data offline as you like with no censorship or restrictions.
The value proposition of Anthropic is comically bad to anyone that understands how to insert PCI-E cards into a motherboard and install linux.
Those are all well worth being a month behind frontier models.
These days I have significantly higher self respect, always have multiple income and funding sources, and a lot more protective of my time.
and later replies often elucidate the value actually added,
even when people are complaining.
Lean towards helping! Especially if someone shows traits you want in your society!
At the company Christmas party that year (which had clients invited, for reasons I do not know) - that client merrily said to my face "boy, I thought the project was going to fail with a woman in charge, but you sure proved me wrong!"
Apparently I had murder written all over my face, and coworkers who overheard were impressed I didn't deck him.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
They’re even trying to expose some of it as a summary, as part of the anthropomorphization of Claude.
https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/2062768969560510486
https://x.com/typesfast/status/2062791307094048937
https://x.com/awxjack/status/2062605286683336757
https://x.com/travisk/status/2062224472426365045
https://x.com/mark_cummins/status/2062293061426663612
Which were replaced with non-canonical URLs:
https://xcancel.com/dunkhippo33/status/2062768969560510486
https://xcancel.com/typesfast/status/2062791307094048937
https://xcancel.com/awxjack/status/2062605286683336757
https://xcancel.com/travisk/status/2062224472426365045
https://xcancel.com/mark_cummins/status/2062293061426663612
Apparently by you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420245
With what authority are VCs claiming to be capable of being an accurate judge of talent or character in less than an hour?
Sounds like said VC in your example is doing insufficient due diligence and just investing based on vibes.
But, of course, you often don’t find out what lay down the road not travelled, except for those companies that get funded elsewhere, so it’s not like there’s an obvious objective measure.
I can’t help wondering if it’s a bit like Moneyball though and, if you had good enough data that you could model it well enough, you’d discover a lot of that taste is just shooting bull and doesn’t amount to much. Possibly there’d be a lot of variability across VCs.
Judging by the stories being shared here, that is all it takes to get funded...
I do think it would be fun to have an "i feel lucky"-style random selection of highlights.
Insert 2-4 $1200 r9700 GPUs in a Linux 7.0.0+ machine with 64GB+ of DDR4-5 memory, fire up llama.cpp, and connect with any OpenAI compatible tools.
A free public anonymous LLM like BigPickle can easily set up the software for you if in doubt.
Obviously, it becomes better to have local models running on your own hardware — that will be best. I don't think we are there yet, though. Software, yes. If you tweak Pi and DeepSeek Pro, you can get Claude-code-level stuff. You'd still need to buy the hardware, though. Not cheap. Eventually, it will get very cheap.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317774
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48311485
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212493
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071262
In the current case, I decided not to do that because it would have made the toptext way too noisy, so I chose the domain that most people would be able to read.
As for HN's policy, you're right about the rule but not its scope. It only applies to submission links, i.e. the URL that a story title is linked to, which also determines the domain displayed to the right of the title.
This doesn’t seem correct. I can view all of these without a Twitter login. Compare this with nytimes, where a login is required but we still always post the canonical URL per the guideline.
> Plus this helps to reduce offtopic complaints in threads.
That can be a fixed with moderation and bans.
> That can be a fixed with moderation and bans.
That is an excessive view of what can be done with hard power!