Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vessenes 767 days ago
Yep I'm sure I can speak for all of the $100M-fund work out of your home office types. Or at least > 99%. The Venn overlap between "content with promising people you'll make money for them believably", "too cheap to spend on office / marketing because your fake pitch was so good nobody will need it to feel comfortable", "enough executive function to make believable calls on believable companies while doing no sourcing work" and "$2mm for three years until people catch on, but def don't send me to prison" is absolutely zero or very close to it.

Most who run a fund like this do not think of it as low pressure or cushy, regardless of goals. Something I tell my portco CEOs a lot is that as much as they want to raise money, or need money for their company, in general, VCs they are talking to need to write checks even more. Just not bad checks.
1 comments
vidarh 766 days ago
I've not lost billions twice, but have definitely lost tens of millions, and worked alongside at lost one person who lost a billion once... It's an "interesting" business to be in...
link
vessenes 766 days ago
Third time's the charm :)
link
vidarh 766 days ago
If you ever need someone to help you lose a billion, I'm sure I can think of a few ways of doing so quickly and efficiently.
link
fragmede 766 days ago
a billion is a lot though. I don't know that I could come up with ways to do that much so quickly and efficiently. what would be your ways?
link
vidarh 766 days ago
It really depends

Spending a billion dollars take a lot of effort (or so I assume; I've "only" spent millions). People will ask annoying questions like "where is the billion dollars coming from, I had no idea you were a billionaire", and ask about AML etc.

Conversely, driving down the value of a company that's already worth billions is "easy": Just publicly demonstrate your willingness to drive the company totally into the ground.

Or if you want speed, and have access to the funds, the super-fast way would be transferring a billion worth of crypto to a random address.

For my part, my biggest "losses" were paper values in startups that failed or didn't get the exits we'd hoped for. There it's also "easy".

link