[popcorncowboy]

> a16z's investment thesis completely centers around finding the next bagholder for their investments.

Boom, yes, this. I think a big part of the (for lack of a better phrase) butt-hurt the best of HN feels towards a16z is summed up by the Obi-wan scene where he's screaming at Anakin about how he was supposed to be the chosen one blah blah you've hurt my feelings because I truly believed you could have been something you are clearly not etc.

In reality, a16z are shrewd, smart operators, and it's a valid, scary effective investment thesis to be able to push waves higher due to your own gravitas. If you had the Buffet/Elon effect (genuine ability to move markets) and could, why wouldn't you trade on it?

The "they were the best of us and now look at them" is a sad, hard reality lesson for anyone feeling it, and utterly irrelevant to a16z.

[JumpCrisscross]

> a16z are shrewd, smart operators...if you had the Buffet/Elon effect (genuine ability to move markets) and could, why wouldn't you trade on it

Because you want to keep it. a16z's returns have been bottom-tier for a while. It's partly why they switched models from VC to retail asset manager. (The other part was to trade crypto.) That lack of returns translates to a lack of carry, which corrodes one's ability to attract and retain talent. It's a doom loop they've been floundering in for at least half a decade.

[ilikerashers]

I know a London-based VC who calls them the Daily Mail of Venture Capital.

Loud, noisy, full of half truths, sensationalist.

[toomuchtodo]

You know that “don’t anthropomorphize the lawn mower” bit about Larry Ellison and Oracle? Same story different org.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

[gcanyon]

I'll never forget when I was at HBO in the '90s (large Oracle shop at the time) and we were trying to figure out an Oracle product. I wasn't core to the effort; I was just trying to help, since the people smarter than I was were completely stuck.

So I asked for the install cd. I figured I could install the product in question (Oracle Forms? It's been too long and I barely remember) and poke around, and maybe a beginner's eyes would see something the masters missed.

I stuck the cd in my computer and clicked the installer. It asked which install file I wanted to execute. There's more than one? Yep, several. And not all in one folder, clearly labeled. They were in several different places on the cd, and named things like x39usethis21 and yz2nousethis982. It was a completely garbage experience.

And to be clear, this wasn't some hand-crafted one-off. This was a silk-screened, mass-produced, official Oracle product.

So I went to the documentation, also on the cd. It wasn't in text files, or even standard html files -- there was a special documentation reader application, because of course there was -- even though the files were obviously (nearly) standard html. And again, the documentation app wanted to know what file to start with, and the doc files weren't well organized, and didn't have an obvious starting place. So I opened the most likely candidate, which turned out to not be the documentation root. But it did have a menu of links, and there was one that was labeled "index" or "start here" or something.

I clicked the link and got a 404. Double-check: yes, it's pointing to a location on the cd, just not one where there's a file.

There's more to the story, but the above pattern continued throughout. And the experts never got the tool to work, after months of trying, with Oracle consulting on speed-dial.

This confirmed what I've described since the '80s as Canyon's Law of Inverse Usability: the price of a product and the usability of that product tend to correlate inversely.

[jonathankoren]

I also discovered that law. Sometimes I’ve even declared, “This software really sucks. We must be paying $200,000 a year for this.”

[gcanyon]

Yep. I first realized this in the '80s when I was working in FileMaker Plus (from Nashoba at the time) to import data and print out bulk mail. FMP was WYSIWYG -- easy layout tools, and I could make anything I wanted happen in seconds with a ~$2800 Mac 512k and a ~$7000 laserwriter.

One time we had a job that required a high-speed printer, so we went to a copy shop. They had a ~$300K Xerox printer that was the size of three washing machines side by side. It could print something like 20-30 pages per minute compared to the laserwriter's 2(?).

And the Xerox had something like a 4-inch amber-and-black display, and the guy setting up the job was putting in parameters by hand, almost like writing code to do the layout. He spent a minute doing that, hit the button, the machine spun up, and then BOOM, out came a page. And the layout was wrong.

He spent 20 minutes getting the layout right, through maybe 10 iterations of write code, spit out a copy, see that it was wrong.

And that's when it hit me: with a machine that expensive, you want it working non-stop. Time spent on setup is time wasted, clearly. And yet no one at Xerox was thinking about that, obviously, because that thing couldn't have wasted more of its time on setup if they'd tried.

And on the other hand, the (relatively) cheap Mac+LaserWriter had WYSIWYG and was ready the first time, every time. It was insane the difference between the two.

[cdme]

It's still a thing with Oracle. I worked at a large music retailer running on ATG/Oracle commerce and I don't think I ever saw documentation on how any of it worked.

The folks on the backend had it running and, if they were out, you were SOL. It was 7+ sites running out of a ~10 year old code base with an alarming amount of technical debt. I'm sure it wasn't cheap.

[CPLX]

> If you had the Buffet/Elon effect (genuine ability to move markets) and could, why wouldn't you trade on it?

Because trading on it to extract other people’s money as part of fraudulent schemes will destroy your reputation.

The only reason to do it is if you feel your reputation is unearned and worthless and this is the best thing you can do with it.

There are definitely other ways to make a living.

[jonathankoren]

The only reputation that matters is the reputation of making money.

That's the only business investment firms have ever been in. To believe otherwise is naïveté.

[CPLX]

Clearly that's not correct.

A reputation for making money unfairly, and at the expense of others is, and has always been, extremely relevant to your ability to convince other people to do business with you.

[jonathankoren]

Yeah. That's why hedge funds and private equity in general went out of business 40 years ago.

Seriously. As someone that grew up in the 80s and watched how Milton Friedman's id was unleashed, and continues to run rampant today, there's little evidence to support your thesis.

[CPLX]

I mean in general I agree with you. Just having a ton of money has its own kind of reputation.

But these guys have really traded far beyond their actual raw financial power due to reputation.

[wslh]

If you know you will receive your cut as LP you don't care while you are not the defraud one.

[JumpCrisscross]

> only reputation that matters is the reputation of making money

Within this context, totally agree. It's where a16z has failed: its returns are subpar. The other failures flow from that.

[pigscantfly]

Just curious, are there any sources you could share on that? Or is this the kind of intel you need to be in the really, really in-crowd for in order to know what's really going on?

[Edit]: Can't reply that deep in the thread, but thanks for the insight!

[JumpCrisscross]

> are there any sources you could share on that

a16z started lagging in 2016 [1]. That led to the crypto fund in 2018 [2] and registering as an investment adviser in 2019 [3]. The '18 crypto fund did well [4], so they quadrupled down on the crack pipe and returned to form [5].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/andreessen-horowitzs-returns-tr...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/andreessen-horowitz-has-a-...

[3] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/cryptocurrency/andreesen...

[4] https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/a16zs-first-crypto-...

[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/andreessen-horowitz-went-all-in...

[moron4hire]

"Here lies Jonathan Koren. He made a lot of money."

No, this Gordon Gecko philosophy is why the 2010s were a cultural wasteland.

[jonathankoren]

Dude. This philosophy has been driving everything since the 1980s. Either as a rejection, and embracing of it.