Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by infocollector 1773 days ago
Any thoughts on how to fix this? Regulation will be gamed the same way the current system has a problem.
4 comments

bad investors will eventually go broke in 7 years when they have no actual exits, but what’s insane is that bad investors aren’t going broke, the insanity is insanely profitable, presumably due to the macro climate, which makes them good investors (or selection bias but what’s the difference)
Wholesale replacement of the current way of creating and allocating capital and debt with a better system.
Basic seed funding. Every x years anyone who an complete a detailed business plan can get a 50k (adjust ad desired) seed grant. Part of that could be an automatic second round grant application, where the govt takes some shares if they hit some standardized cash flow target. After that let the private ventures in.

Govt shares go into a citizens wealth fund and are setup to require a standard dividend formula that triggers based some formula of certain revenue or funding trigger/ramp up threshold.

That’s just a proposal for basic income with some weird paperwork involved. It’s trivial to stamp out detailed business plans when you don’t have to convince people they are feasible.
Have you ever heard of an SBA loan? The difference here is that it becomes an grant, and has a exit gateway of demonstrating cashflow (or some other merit) to get to higher stages of funding.

When you look at numbers of new business starts - even with venture capital and the yc model becoming popular, the numbers are at a multi decade low. The people who our current system selects to take a risk with look far too uniform from far to homogeneous an outlook. This would be a way to setup a monkey throwing darts at random, but the non randomly pick up the next stage winners to position them for private investment. But with society reaping benefits of wins.

> The difference here is that it becomes an grant

Yes, that’s what makes it basic income. What’s to prevent people from copy-pasting the same “local restaurant” business plan every year and just going “whoops, it failed”?

It's not like this isn't a hole in the market. The problem is the incentive to invest in better ideas isn't stronger.
Please define a better idea, and why that is valuable, and how much that might be worth.

I’m always surprised at how much people value an idea verses making that idea happen.