[JumpCrisscross]

Tied to, and acting at the behest of, are night and day. One allows you to presume they're acting in their own financial interests, by and large, just like every other investor. The other merits caution.

Your larger point, that we should have been more cautious, stands. We should have figured this out. But dollars danced, and even the best of us started rationalizing [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143894

[throwawaysml]

True, and a fine line which is hard to judge from the seats we sit in. But I agree that a US company cannot be associated with the Kremlin or Beijing or Riad in 2017 without consequences. Maybe in 2023.

I just don't want to see a McCarthy witch hunt when a lot of the money floating in Wallstreet and the Valley is of dubious origin.

I would equally oppose taking money from one of the CIA VC firms, even that one where Dan Geer works. And I kinda have this idea that by now enough money is floating around valley from the money made in the valley that it should be possible to use that "pre-laundered" (if we may call it that) capital.

That said, I have no idea how a startup would vet the VC's capital backers, or what they should do when they find out some of it came from beijing, moscow, tel aviv, and you want to give it back to disassociate your startup.

[paganel]

> I would equally oppose taking money from one of the CIA VC firms, even that one where Dan Geer works.

Facebook's advisor on its $19B acquisition of Whatsapp was a "privately held boutique investment bank" called Allen & Company, which at the time was led (maybe it still is, it doesn't show up at all on his personal wiki page) by former CIA director George Tenet. Not 6-months had passed since this acquisition and Putin started talking in the media about how the Internet is controlled by the US 3-letter agencies. Shortly after that his cronies fully took control of VKontakte.