[riffraff]

Matt Levine (financial columnist) often makes the point (or joke) that in fund management there a tendency to reward (as in: they get more money to manage) people who lost a lot of money, on the basis that they did manage to have a lot of money to start with, make bold bets, and should at least have learned something at this point.

[manquer]

That is not unique to fund managers.

Second time entrepreneurs are more likely to raise capital even if their first venture failed and spectacularly so.

Adam Neumann got funded by a16z(their largest?) despite all the governance issues at Wework , there are many other examples of high profile and regular entrepreneurs getting funding .

[rchaud]

The difference is that Neumann didn't attempt to conceal his scam in the slightest, and more importantly, he didn't break any laws, just screwed over his investors.

[manquer]

> just screwed over his investors.

> didn't break any laws,

To VCs, I would imagine the first is bigger disqualification than the second.

Startups are modeled around breaking laws to disrupt all the time. Ask for forgiveness than permission mentality.

Uber and Airbnb did it with taxi, breaking privacy laws in Europe by ad supported tech or fintech with AML/KYC securities law or more recently on copyright law to build their training data by ai companies . All of these depend on law being broken to succeed.

Calculating the risk of prosecution and the size of the penalty with upside of doing it anyway happens in these companies all the time.