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Investors Who Back VC Funds Are Worried About Valley Culture (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Limited partners in venture capital funds are having conversations about how to prevent themselves from investing in the next Binary Capital, the Silicon Valley firm that has collapsed over allegations that one of its co-founders sexually harassed female entrepreneurs. This includes the largest LP trade group -- the Institutional Limited Partners Association -- which tells Axios that it is planning to address these issues this summer, as part of the development of its new ILPA Principles 3.0 document. Silicon Valley, and venture capital in particular, has swept sexual harassment under the rug for decades. Binary Capital, coming on top of the situation at Uber, has grabbed that rug and begun to shake it vigorously.
To be fair, this happens to every niche thing that gets big. There are always a few hardworking folk who get it off the ground, followed by a torrent of bottom feeders seeking gold that ruin the party. The gender politics bit is at right angles to this, and is mainly thanks to awkward my little pony fucks, trying to bang the fat purple haired cows that may decide to mount them, if they are lucky. Basically, losers trying to get laid being played by broken chicks with personality disorders.
There's always been women with terrific math/programming skills. That's nothing new. What's new is that the industry is now bloated with incompetents, it's like a gold rush. And it attracts (in part) immature men and gold digging women. The Julian Assanges, the Ellen Paos. They're the bloat.
There's no deep social movement, no revolution with long-term impact, no real disruption. The number of competent people in tech hasn't changed over the last 25 years, there's just more incompetents around who think they belong.
Same shit happened in finance and real estate. Just wait, the pendulum is coming back at some point.
lucm, indeed.
There are other, nicer places with better culture.
I've said this before, but there are many incompetent males that get hired in computer, but the women who are hired are almost always well above average. There will be equality when incompetent women get hired at the same rate as the incompetent men.
I have been in the tech world for more than 3 decades. I have also seen the VC scene in many places from big to podunk. I would say that the VC types that I meet come in 3 main flavours. Arrogant bean counters who know what is good for you. Arrogant assholes who think they are god. And Arrogant thieves who pretty much have to rip you off to make themselves feel better.
My favourite was at a recent tech talk by a woman (who gives government money to VCs) (Canada) who said that she won't give money if the founders make too much (over 100k) but that she was leaving government to become an advisor to a start-up that had recently raised around 5m. I asked her if she was only going to take 100k. She pretty much yelled at me that I had no understanding of the real world.
Her theory was that if you give the founders more than 100k in salary they become distracted spending it.
I was wondering how I could expose her in some way for the corruption she was displaying by working for a company she had just given government money to when I witnessed one of the tech people who had attended her talk, keying the living crap out of her car with the words, 100k over and over.
It was a brand new higher end BMW BTW. On a funny note, there is nothing funnier than some podunk tech "titan" who sells some company for 10-20 mil and starts giving TED style keynote speeches that are the tech equivalent of spiritual mumbo-jumbo while wearing clothing that they spent much time and money on trying to look really casual. The contrast with the person who usually gives a too long winded introduction and wears an ill-fitting off the rack suit just makes it all funnier.
Then all the desperate start-up types try their damnedest to "network" with the speaker who basically holds out their hand for their ring to be kissed.
I love how they play up their serial entrepreneur business creds when their actual history is: fail-fail-fail-fail-lottery-fail-fail-fail-fail.