[mauvehaus]

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super Bowl campaign[1].

Are VC's just that lazy about making investment decisions? Is this yet another side-effect of ZIRP[2] and too much money chasing a return? Is nobody looking too hard in the hope of catching the next rocket to the moon?

From the outside, investing based on GitHub stars seems insane. Like, this can't be a serious way of investing money. If you told me you were going to invest my money based on GitHub stars, I'd laugh, and then we'd have an awkward silence while I realize there isn't a punchline coming.

[0] I'm from Cleveland. I get to pick on them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cleveland_Browns_seaso... I think their record speaks for itself.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy

[arjie]

Because the entire point is to be early to something here. If you wait for profitability, the guy is already funded. So you have to use proxies, and the proxies will be imperfect, but you don't have to be perfect. You just need some degree of performance. Stars are (were) an early indicator of community interest and predictably became goodharted when this became known. But I think it's been since 2022 since anyone seriously used stars for VC targeting so this is sort of old hat.

It's a bit like the old article about evaluating software companies on whether they have version control or not. Everyone has version control now.

[Aurornis]

Social proof has always been a factor in investments. Not the only factor, but seeing signs of popularity has always been an input to investment decisions.

The entire game of startup investing is to identify breakout companies early. Social proof (when valid, not faked) of interest is one of the strongest signals of product market fit.

If a product has a lot of attention (users, headlines, stars, downloads, DAU) that’s a signal that it could also have a lot of customers some day. This is also why all of those metrics are targets for manipulation.

> This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have

Major sports team are about engaging fans. If a promising recruit had a huge social media presence then that could be a contributing factor toward trying to recruit that player.

This is actually easier to understand if you look at the inverse: Some times there are players with amazing stats but who have a cloud of controversy following them. Teams will skip over these problematic players despite their performance because having popular and engaging players is important for teams but having anti-popular players will drive away fans.

[xnorswap]

I don't follow American Football so I don't know how coaching contracts work for you guys, but how does someone go 1W 15L one season, survive as head coach to go 0W 16L the next season, and still start the next season after that as head coach?

Over here the fans would be singing "You're getting sacked in the morning" halfway through that first season.

I guess not having relegation makes things slightly less ruthless for you.

[mkovach]

The prevailing narrative here is that the team was actively looking to lose to acquire draft picks. Hugh Jackson was extremely good at losing, so he stayed.

The owner of the Cleveland Browns uses the team to generate more revenue. For NFL teams, performance has little to do with their value or ability to generate additional revenue.

There is no strong financial incentive to win in the NFL, aside from the owner's ego. The Browns' owner's ego is driven by money, and the result shows on the field.

[datsci_est_2015]

> For NFL teams, performance has little to do with their value or ability to generate additional revenue.

Like an allegory for performative capitalism in America. Profit and quality completely decoupled in the wake of market capture (rent seeking).

[triceratops]

> The prevailing narrative here is that the team was actively looking to lose to acquire draft picks

But if they don't care about winning, why bother getting good draft picks?

[xnorswap]

From doing more research about this, it seems they don't want to use the good draft picks, but to sell them on to teams that do want to win.

The draft pick is itself a commodity that can be traded*, so by losing they get a premium commodity, that they can sell on, and by selling their picks they ensure that they continue to lose to get the valuable commodity.

They even lobbied to tweak rules around selling draft picks: https://www.reuters.com/sports/browns-ask-nfl-allow-draft-pi...

* This seems completely absurd to me, but perhaps there would just be backroom deals otherwise, and having it sanctioned brings it into the light?

[rhplus]

Yeah, exactly. The NFL is a closed system franchise. The same 32 teams play every season whether they win or lose. No team risks relegation to a lower revenue league. Every team gets a roughly equal share of the franchise revenue regardless of performance.

[bombcar]

Owners don’t care about winning, but about profitability. And you can make a lot of money with a failing football team (selling/trading draft picks, etc) and your fans get used to losing …

[xnorswap]

Right, I forgot you guys have "The Draft", so failing is an advantage, doubly so if you can sell your draft picks, because then you can keep losing by having sold away the mechanism for getting you competitive again.

I am so glad the proposed "European super league" was killed off so hard, so that we don't get a franchise model, it produces so many adverse incentives.

[bombcar]

The thing I like about EU football is that if your team sucks arse through a garden hose too long, your entire team gets demoted to a lower league.

That would put a fire under some asses!

[rbonvall]

Note that it's not a European thing. It's how most football leagues around the world work.

[triceratops]

Drafts and no relegation.

[lordgrenville]

More to the point, in the US losing teams get rewarded in the form of draft picks, which sometimes creates perverse incentives. This doesn't exist in European football. (Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about American sports.)

[bombcar]

Draft picks + salary caps and the various workarounds involved there make it more of a financier's dream than a competitive sport.

[The_Blade]

just wait until you get to the subject of tanking in the NBA

is there a tech equivalent? like you do a crappy job with your series A on purpose which helps you get a better series B. although there is the notion of a big round of layoffs to secure further investment

[mauvehaus]

In truth, I don't follow sports much, but I'm really not sure either.

I do find the model European Football (soccer) using promotion and relegation to be much more interesting, both from the standpoint of culling out perennially hopeless teams from top-tier competition, and for having a place for people to play who aren't absolute superstars.

[bena]

If Jackson signed a three-year contract, then the Browns would be paying him for three years regardless. Even if they fired him. Then he could go work for another team and get paid by both teams.

Regardless, a coach is given some leeway their first season. They were coming off a 3-13 season, so 1-15 isn't that much of a drop. Jackson could make the case that he needed another season to build his ideal roster.

Then after going 0-16, they were on track to get Mayfield. He could have made the case that if he can't win with Mayfield, then maybe he just can't win.

Then he didn't win with Mayfield.

[The_Blade]

Browns fan in. We're owned by a criminal (truck stop-related fraud) who was convinced by a homeless person to draft Johnny Manziel. trust me, we want to put him (and Paul Dolan) into graveyard orbit. but it's not like Vercel where you can just go use AWS or Cloudflare or whatever; and it's not like switching makes you weak, you stand by your team through the hard times!

plus, what is an NFL fan going to do, stop watching football? hahahahahaha

[mkovach]

Hey, you can say that the Dolans should/could spend more, but I don't think you really want an owner who has solidified the team in Cleveland, has the fourth-best record in baseball over the past 10 years, and has seven recent playoff appearances in the graveyard.

The Haslams? Yeah, they should really sell the team, but I figure in about 10-15 years, they'll move it out of Cleveland.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> plus, what is an NFL fan going to do, stop watching football? hahahahahaha

Former Seahawks fan here, it's easier than you think. (It wasn't their record, I stuck with them through the 90s after all, it was realizing what CTE meant for the players).

[gopher_space]

As far as I could tell everyone got a Sounders jersey in the mail as part of the Sonics move.

[riazrizvi]

VCs are middlemen. It's not their money. As long as they can find a narrative to raise money, make a commission and do damage control on their reputation after the fallout, then their side pieces will never want for nothing.

[neom]

As far as I recall it stared in 2014 or so, yes metrics could/were still gamed, but there was still a belief in VC that OSS projects could turn into Red Hats. First I heard of it was when a VC told me they were "looking for the next docker" and mentioned something about Rancher OS and how quickly it's stars/follows were growing. In VC you tend to have conviction builders, and conviction buyers. I suppose what happened was some conviction builders used growth of a project on gh as part of a leading indicator (valid or otherwise), and conviction buyers picked up on that as a method.

[sidewndr46]

Hiring a QB based off instagram followers isn't even that unrealistic. If you can put together a team to win the Superbowl, sure do it! If not, just get together a team that people enjoy following and watching. Much of that would be putting athletes on the field that people engage with.

[bigfishrunning]

I agree! Maybe the Browns have never played a Superbowl, but I would imagine they are still making a profit. Different goal.

[ramesh31]

>Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points?

Github stars used to really mean something. Having 1k+ was considered a stable, mature library being used in prod by thousands of people. At 10k+ you were a top level open source project. Now they've been gamed by the dead internet just like everything else, and it's depressing as hell.

[ninjahawk1]

$1M-$10M is basically nothing for the big companies investing, they can literally mark it off as costs, and if one of them so happens to actually succeed they make it all back plus some.

It’s not that they’re necessarily careless, it’s just that the bigger the net the more fish you catch. And when you own both all the fishing boats and all the nets…might as well cast wide.

[bombcar]

This has happened in multiple industries a number of times - publishers discover that people with large twitter followings sell a decent number of books, so they start selecting new authors who only have large twitter followings, and discover is was correlation and not causation.

And once it gets out that it’s a selection criteria it gets gamed to hell and back.

[mauvehaus]

I appreciate this, but the stakes have to be a lot lower bringing a book to market than making a $1,000,000 to $10,000,000 seed investment. I'd sort of expect that when you're dealing with sums of money that size there would be some grown-ups in the room.

[consp]

You just stated Goodharts law in effect.*

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[ngruhn]

Also known as Goodharts law.

[4er_transform]

No VC makes an investment off the star count. It’s a signal to identify opportunities in the noise.

Once surfaced, there’s other signals to filter if an initial conversation is even worth it.

Assuming everyone else is just stupid and it’s all luck is a good way to hold yourself back from your potential.

[gk--]

> This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric

sounds like how the ufc does it

[jcalx]

> This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that

Not quite the same, but the New York Jets (one of the few NFL teams that can match the dysfunction of the Browns — they have the longest active playoff drought in big 4 North American sports) passed on a few successful players because the owner, Woody Johnson, reportedly didn't like their Madden (video game) ratings [0]:

> A few weeks later, Douglas and his Broncos counterpart, George Paton, were deep in negotiations for a trade that would have sent Jeudy to the Jets and given future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers another potential playmaker. The Broncos felt a deal was near. Then, abruptly, it all fell apart. In Denver’s executive offices, they couldn’t believe the reason why.

> Douglas told the Broncos that Johnson didn’t want to make the trade because the owner felt Jeudy’s player rating in “Madden NFL,” the popular video game, wasn’t high enough, according to multiple league sources. The Broncos ultimately traded the receiver to the Cleveland Browns. Last Sunday, Jeudy crossed the 1,000-yard receiving mark for the first time in his career.

...

> Johnson’s reference to Jeudy’s “Madden” rating was, to some in the Jets’ organization, a sign of Brick and Jack’s influence. Another example came when Johnson pushed back on signing free-agent guard John Simpson due to a lackluster “awareness” rating in Madden. The Jets signed Simpson anyway, and he has had a solid season: Pro Football Focus currently has him graded as the eighth-best guard in the NFL.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6005172/2024/12/19/woody-jo...

[boondongle]

Almost all industries have divested themselves from the thing thing they supposedly had expertise in towards exploiting crowdsourced alternatives and then pocketing the extra money.

Record labels did this with soundcloud or only picking up people who already had a following. Movies have done this repeatedly with adaptation (due respect to people who like their books remade faithfully, there's a reason the 70's/80's were that decade and it basically stopped once Comics/LotR arrived). A24 represents a disruption, not a normal studio. Books did this with webnovels or paying dirt cheap and making the Author market.

What people tend to forget is they're just resource gatekeepers. They could just choose to invest in offices with cats because an office with cats popped massively one time and you can't say they're wrong, because there's no alternative funding you can get to A/B test with. In theory there are different firms - but they often went to the same schools, same peer group, same fraternity/sororities, and once they're in the wild they all know each other. It's not a different behavior if it's VC or if it's Nashville.

The real question is how long before either governmental-busting or someone notices the lack of care with money and shops alternatives. In theory this is also partially why American firms face international risk - lacking people respecting their laziness, someone can break their model.

That said - I'm not saying they're not smart - just that often there's a tendency to delude that shortcuts taken represent a "good job" rather than "no one can really say we're doing it poorly".

[jazzypants]

It's strange that I don't even get defensive about people picking on the Browns anymore. Weirdly, them giving a serial rapist over $200,000,000 was actually good for my mental health long-term. After 30 years of tying myself in knots trying to explain away their idiocy, I don't have to be weighed down by their terrible decisions anymore.

[jmyeet]

I agree with you but the funny thing about this comment is that fake Internet points is how decisions are made in many areas, including casting for TV shows and movies.

If you want to make it as an actor today, you need a social media following [1]. It is directly relevant to you getting cast. It also helps you connect with other actors, with producers and directors, etc.

Thing is, this isn't new. before social media, your influence was measured in "tear sheets" [2], basically any published story that you're in. This could be something as simple as going to Cannes or Sundance or even just to the hottest club.

Sports also uses a points system (kind of) but it's meant to reflect ability. Take the NFL, for example. Going from high school to college and college to the NFL, you will have stats relevant to whatever position(s) you play. For a QB it's things like interceptions, passing years, running yards, completed throw percentages, etc. You then have the NFL Combine [3]. This is an intensive camp where certain metrics are taken like how much you can lift, 40 yard dash, etc.

All of this tries to make it a science, or at least quantitative. But what I find funny is that despite all this work, it can still fail spectacularly. Like, being the #1 draft pick for the NFL is kind of a curse [4].

And then there's Tom Brady. For people unfamiliar with American sportsball, Tom Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback in the game's history, having 7 Superbowl rings. Thing is, he was a 6th round draft pick in the 2000 NFL draft. For anyone not familiar with what that means, 6th (and especially 7th) round draft picks are like the bottom of the barrel. You're not expected to take a starting position. You may not even play unless 1-2 people get injured. Nobody expects you to be a great.

[1]: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/social-media-acto...

[2]: https://avenueagency.wordpress.com/tag/tear-sheet

[3]: https://www.nfl.com/combine

[4]: https://www.si.com/more-sports/2011/01/13/sportscasting-exce...

[jt2190]

>

Union Labs is the most consequential case. It was ranked #1 on Runa Capital's ROSS Index for Q2 2025 - a widely cited VC industry report identifying the "hottest open-source startups" - with 54.2x star growth and 74,300 stars. Our analysis found 32.7% zero-repo accounts, 52% zero-follower accounts, and a fork-to-star ratio of 0.052. The StarScout analysis flagged it with 47.4% suspected fake stars. An influential investment-sourcing report that VCs rely on was topped by a project with nearly half its stars suspected as artificial.

[ertgbnm]

Instagram follows is not a good way to hire football players but it's probably a good way to hire instagram influencers. The football analogy is a little unfair because VCs are investing in more than just a company's ability to "play football" they are investing in the brand, the marketing, and the vision. GitHub stars are at least an indication of a startup having a promising brand or some ability to market themselves.

Nevertheless, VCs are in fact pretty dumb sometimes and it'd be stupid to invest soley based on stars.

[calebkaiser]

I've worked on two open source infrastructure projects that raised money now, and am friends with people involved in many more. I'd put a couple of asterisks next to the claims in this article:

- VCs definitely cared about our Stars, especially in early stages, but not as our primary metric. I suppose Stars might be the primary metric if they're truly off the charts, but usually they're just one of many social proof signals an investor might look at.

- Investors, especially at the earliest stages, are quite a varied bunch. Some were diligent about looking at who was leaving Stars on the repo (i.e. are these accounts fake/do they belong to potential future customers). Some less so. This is true for basically every metric (see: startups that grossly misreport ARR)

- Fake GitHub stars were a thing way before 2022. I'd have to look in more detail at the methodology here, but I'd question any analysis that finds that paying for GitHub Stars (or any social following kind of metric) is a strictly post-2022 thing. Any metric that can be construed as social proof will immediately have its own grifter economy. Investors know this and (mostly) do their diligence.

Finally, showing numbers is hard for an early stage open source startup. At later stages, you should be able to show an actual business with typical metrics, but at the seed stage you often just have a repo and a website. Your goal is just to get a lot of people using your software. You can add telemetry to track that, but that's a thorny decision. GitHub Stars aren't a terrible proxy for popularity, provided that you audit the quality of the following. A project with a lot of organic stars and forks is, at the very least, a project that a lot of people are familiar with.

I'm not saying that GitHub Stars aren't wildly overvalued or gamed, but contextualized properly, they're a reasonable metric to consider, particularly at earlier stages. Most investors aren't just throwing millions at random repositories with 20k Stars from obviously spam accounts.

[pmichaud]

I think it's probably a little bit about Goodhart? At some point soon after stars were widely in use but prior to them being connected to any particular incentive I bet they were actually a great signal of... something. But then once someone started using the signal to give attention or dollars, the signal was compromised.

[AndrewKemendo]

When I took over MLAgents at the end of 2021, before Unity fully shit themselves after the insane Weta acquisition, the main metric they were using to promote the project internally were github stars

Yes actually

Needless to say they didn’t like when I said this was a worthless metric and we needed to be using something like “working policies” or “time saved training”

[jordemort]

should have bought a few thousand stars on the internet and then taken the promotion to director

[AndrewKemendo]

I was already a director and didn’t need the promotion

I just wanted to build a good product but unfortunately good products are not relevant

[sidewndr46]

For those of us that don't understand what was so insane about the Weta acquisition?

[AndrewKemendo]

It never made sense. Weta tools don’t work with Unity at all

There were no complementary workflows or infrastructure or anything.

It was explicitly a move to try to counter epic’s positioning and internally it was very obviously a JR versus Tim pissing contest (and JR was the only one in the contest because Tim didn’t give a fuck about Unity)

[next_xibalba]

> Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points?

It's purely incentives. Heavy competition for early signal identification has pushed them to crappier and crappier indicators.

[kibwen]

[flagged]

[dang]

Maybe so, but please don't call names, fulminate, or post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. You can make your substantive points without these, and we're trying for something different here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Perhaps you don't owe morons, VCs, or rich people better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

[jordanb]

Listening to All In is a real eye opening experience. Especially when they have guests on and they're exactly like the regulars.

[next_xibalba]

I actually think this take is wrong... but the moment Travis Kalanick was a guest and claimed that he was on the verge of discovering new physics with the aid of ChatGPT was an eye opening moment.

[HoldOnAMinute]

"new-to-me" physics

[jordanb]

Not even that it was just a bunch of AI-psychosis nonsense:

https://futurism.com/former-ceo-uber-ai

[bix6]

I have zero respect for All In. It’s a shame people pay those guys any mind.

[indymike]

An echo in the sounding chamber? Say it isn't so...

[rib3ye]

this is compounded by young, newly rich tech workers (no kids, no mortgage, maybe not even a car) experimenting with being a VC because they've recently reached accredited investor status.

and it's not just ZIRP. every recent IPO or liquidity event creates literally 500 more of these guys.

[adamkf]

> maybe not even a car

Hold up — one can be mature without any of those things, but cars are especially optional.

[rib3ye]

maturity has nothing to do with it. these are recurring expense liabilities with very very distant return horizon.

[a1o]

Depending on which city you live, my feeling is owning a car is a lot less optional once you have kids, at least in their earlier years.

[LargeWu]

They say Silicon Valley was more of a documentary than a comedy, and now we have one more way life imitates art: A growing army of Erlich Bachmann's.

[arealaccount]

Jian-Yang's

[Esophagus4]

Big Heads

[necubi]

Those would be angels, not VCs. VCs manage outside money.

[rib3ye]

That's a really good distinction. I realize this is a little snide, but I imagine when they look in the mirror they still see themselves as Marc Andreessen.

[bloppe]

VCs mostly invest other peoples' money, not their own. The "rich people" are often pension funds, endowments, and other pools of capital rather than individual morons.

VCs themselves probably suffer from chronic overestimation of their own intelligence, but there just aren't many good signals at the stage of companies they're looking at. No customers, no revenue; often just an idea and hopefully a prototype. GitHub stars are as good of a signal as letters of intent, which is to say: a bad signal, but at least a signal. Other than that, they have to just evaluate what the founders are telling them (generally unrealistically optimistic at best) and whatever market research they can do (which is hard enough for the founders to do for their own product; image doing this for a dozen different companies every day).

Of course GitHub stars are a terrible signal, but the bar for signal quality is just really low.

[paulorlando]

> the bar for signal quality is just really low During the Covid-era when money was flowing more readily I worked with a series A startup founder on improving their unit economics. They were spending a lot on customer acquisition but after my analysis I realized that they were losing money on each customer. It didn't matter how long you ran the timeline, with churn they never broke even on new customers. When I recommended cutting marketing spend, they told me that they needed to show topline growth -- because that's what investors were looking for. And they knew from experience that the investors didn't dig into the numbers enough to realize they were growing themselves broke.

[bloppe]

Funny anecdote, but that's a bit of a different issue. Actual money moving around is a relatively strong signal. Those investors just aren't looking at the full picture.

[roarcher]

I used to be afflicted with the notion that wealth was correlated with a person's intelligence and work ethic. I was miraculously cured when I went to work for a startup that had to periodically impress VCs to raise capital.

[georgeecollins]

true, but the way I would frame it is we are all morons in someone else's eyes. No one is as smart as they think they are. The mistake Americans make is thinking that rich people are so smart that everything they do is smart.

[kibwen]

Yes, but while we're all born stupid, rich people are subject to forces that actually make them dumber than the average person. Normally people learn from failure because they experience tangible negative consequences as a result of failure. But money is a better insulator than a vacuum, and once you're sufficiently wealthy, failure no longer has any tangible negative effect on your quality of life. Lose ten billion dollars? Lose 90% of your net worth? You and your kin will still be living lives of ease and luxury for generations to come. They're destined to be morons because there's no pressure forcing them to learn from their mistakes.

[georgeecollins]

I don't really see any evidence that the poor are smarter than the rich. You can say that a wealthy person is more insulated from their mistakes, but I think poor and rich react very similarly to major financial setbacks. Yeah, a wealthy person can do something dumb all the time and not feel it, but then a poor person may be doing as proportionately badly with things like credit card fees or sports gambling. If you think you are smarter because you are a "normal person" then I think you need to consider that everyone is dumber then they realize.

[kibwen]

> I don't really see any evidence that the poor are smarter than the rich.

This is attributable to survivorship bias. Poor people who make bad decisions either die in a gutter or die in a cell. Rich people who make bad decisions get golden parachutes and fail upward ad infinitum.

> If you think you are smarter because you are a "normal person" then I think you need to consider that everyone is dumber then they realize.

Firstly, to paraphrase Socrates, I fully own that I'm a dumbass, secondly the events of the past decade made it starkly clear that, yes, everyone is dumber than they realize, and now I'm forced to realize it, too.

[zerkten]

I don't think this is always true, but it's true a lot. I think there are better descriptions than moronic as well. People use moronic when people are just as smart but have a different (and possibly better) direction. It's just the case that it defies the will of the other person.

These people go to the extreme and feel they have to outdo each other in an arms race to win whatever category it is today.

You can have extreme ambitions without being a moron. It's possible for someone to be empathetic, but also really driven. The problem is that they are locked in a downward spiral and they can't possibly be vulnerable. It's only when they run out of money, or some other extreme event occurs that they change tack. That's moronic, especially when the outcomes are predictable.

There is a lot to be said about SV culture and the people that surround these VCs. A lot of people love these environments and more than tolerate the environment these VC folks create. It's hardly a new phenomenon.

[MASNeo]

VCs have no money and few have the money to manage the money entrusted in them. The people that give the money have the money because they ask people to do more with less. In that pinch, one might understand how VCs look to proxies, and often fail to find great ones but at least then it wasn’t expense. Ever tried to sell something to a VC except equity - it’s an educating experience?

[cmrdporcupine]

The answer isn't that they're morons. It's that they aren't people who "invest" in "good businesses" to make money, but instead on the whole a class of individuals classed with gambling on high risk ventures that will have absolutely massive returns and they don't care if 90% of them fail and 9% flounder because the 1% that succeed bring in absolutely apeshit amounts of $$ when they are acquired by someone else.

Using things like github stars is clearly stupid, but not in the way you're suggesting. They're using the GH stars as a proxy metric for "someone else will come along and give money bags to this person later, so I should get in early so I can take that money eventually."

They're operating on metric of success which is about influence and charisma and connectedness, not revenue or technical excellence.

Again, VCs don't care if you'll make a profitable business some day. They're just interested in if someone else will come along and pay out giant bags of cash for it later in a liquidity event. If they get even one of those successes, all the stupid GH star watching pays off.

Here's another way of framing it: any harms from the false positives around "He has a lot of GH stars" or "He went to Stanford" or "I know his father at the country club" are more than mitigated by the one exit in 1000 that makes a bunch of people filthy rich.

We shouldn't expect VCs to be something they're not. But we are missing something inbetween VCs and "self financing" and "bootstrapping"

[palmotea]

> Again, VCs don't care if you'll make a profitable business some day. They're just interested in if someone else will come along and pay out giant bags of cash for it later in a liquidity event. If they get even one of those successes, all the stupid GH star watching pays off.

And if that's true, they should be slapped, hard. They're no longer performing a socially useful function, and and have degraded towards pure financialization. Some middleman between fools and their money.

As much as I don't like Altman, VC should be pumping money into startups like Helios--companies pursuing cutting-edge technology that could totally fail (yes, that's an organic em-dash).

[nradov]

You should start your own VC firm, solicit cash from LPs, and invest in companies like Helios. Go ahead, no one will stop you.

[palmotea]

> You should start your own VC firm, solicit cash from LPs, and invest in companies like Helios. Go ahead, no one will stop you.

Why would I want to do that? I think they should be disciplined until the perform a more socially useful function. Competing with them is an entirely different thing that's unlikely to accomplish that goal.

[wolvesechoes]

"Companies systematically operate in a way that negatively impacts the society" "Just start you own company bro"

This was, is, and always will be a most braindead response in such conversations. I bet you even use the word entrepreneur unironically.

[cmrdporcupine]

I don't think there's ever been an argument that anybody in a free market capitalist economy has to perform a "socially useful function"?

I do think that ZiRP distorted things extremely badly. There's an entire generation in this software industry that lives around the business-culture expectations set during that time which as far as I could see basically amounted to "I build Uber but for X" (where X is some new business domain).

Perhaps after a bit of a painful interregnum things will be a bit different now that rates are higher and risk along with it.

Also anybody can throw a SaaS together in a few days now. Separating the wheat from the chaff in the next few years will be... interesting.

[palmotea]

> I don't think there's ever been an argument that anybody in a free market capitalist economy has to perform a "socially useful function"?

That's a extremely strong statement, and may only be true in libertarian-land, where pure capitalism is a god to be worshiped and "good" has been redefined to be "whatever the unregulated free market does."

But in the real world, capitalism is a tool to perform socially useful functions (see the marketing about how it was better able to do that than Soviet central planning). When it fails, it should be patched by regulation (and often is) to push participants into socially useful actions, or at least discourage socially harmful ones.

[cmrdporcupine]

How is it strong or controversial? It's the open ideology of the times.

I didn't say I agree with it.

[antonvs]

Helios? Altman? I think you mean Helion, the fusion company, not Helios (quantum computers). Either way, that’s a pretty hilarious example to use when you’re criticizing VC foolishness. Anyone doing due diligence wouldn’t go near those companies.

Spoiler alert: commercial fusion power may not be practical at all, but if it is, the timescales to delivery are measured in numbers closer to centuries than decades. Don’t fall for the hype generated to sucker those VCs you’re talking about.

[palmotea]

> Helios? Altman? I think you mean Helion, the fusion company, not Helios (quantum computers). Either way, that’s a pretty hilarious example to use when you’re criticizing VC foolishness. Anyone doing due diligence wouldn’t go near those companies.

I actually don't care that much about the specifics, just the general direction: pumping money into developing technology that doesn't exist, instead of looking to flip yet another software startup where GitHub stars would matter.

[biker142541]

“no longer”… lol

[MASNeo]

Yes. Made my day!

[groundzeros2015]

I know this isn’t quite your point. But for the portfolio approach to be plausible you have to play as if all of them will succeed, and only later sort out the failures.

If you mentally say “well 90% fail so I’ll just throw in this dog shit to see what happens” then you increase the failure rate.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah I can see that.

Another thing I was thinking as I was re-reading this thread is that for some VCs the fact that you can game your GH star count might in fact read as a positive signal. It shows you're willing able to play a kind of vicious PR game to get popularity.

Again, VCs not interested in pure technical excellence or geek "cred". They likely want you if you're the kind of person who can stand in front of a room and puff yourself up and make yourself look more important than you are, and frankly "acquiring" GH stars might just be part of that.

I think it's awful, and I could never do that and my values wouldn't let me buy stars or lie about my projects.

Hence I've been working in this industry for 30 years this year, and I'm still a wage labourer.

[groundzeros2015]

I think this is accurate. It’s a kind of promotion and commitment acumen.

[groundzeros2015]

In other words, VCs should be taking a risk primarily by being very early. They should not be taking risks on low quality people or projects on the off chance that something good comes out.

[nradov]

We're all morons outside of some very narrow areas of expertise. By most criteria James Mattis would be considered a smart guy: he earned a Master's degree, commanded troops effectively in combat, and served as Secretary of Defense. And yet he fell for the Theranos fraud. You have to know your limitations, and too many people think that because they're good at one thing they must be geniuses who are good at everything. Engineers are especially prone to this delusion.

[radiator]

> We're all morons outside of some very narrow areas of expertise

speak for yourself, I guess? Some people know things in many areas. But even if they are not experts outside of their areas of expertise, they may recognize their limitations in other areas and thus avoid making costly mistakes. This may even be the rule for adults, rather than the exception.

[nradov]

Some people believe they know things in many areas. This is typically the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

[rvba]

What does a soldier / pollitical appointment know about finance?

[nradov]

Exactly. That's the point.

[mghackerlady]

hey shhh the ycomb gods might hear us

[rtaylorgarlock]

I got downvoted on another post mentioning VCs. Confirmed everything I already knew about the sheeple

[twic]

VCs are, traditionally, people who made a lot of money in a lottery and think that makes them experts. It's virtually guaranteed they're idiots.

[jt2190]

> … VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points?

The only claim here is that there’s a report that tracks GitHub star growth that is that is presumably read by VCs:

>> Union Labs is the most consequential case. It was ranked #1 on Runa Capital's ROSS Index for Q2 2025 - a widely cited VC industry report identifying the "hottest open-source startups" - with 54.2x star growth and 74,300 stars. Our analysis found 32.7% zero-repo accounts, 52% zero-follower accounts, and a fork-to-star ratio of 0.052. The StarScout analysis flagged it with 47.4% suspected fake stars. An influential investment-sourcing report that VCs rely on was topped by a project with nearly half its stars suspected as artificial.

Again, the claim here is that the report is “influential”. Maybe?

[strangescript]

Same reason why two companies have the same idea, one goes viral and one doesn't. Public opinion matters even if its illogical at times.

[meager_wikis]

And just like with VC's, that one draft pick does eventually lead to a super bowl win, all the Johnny Manziel picks will be forgiven

[comprev]

These days many DJs are booked on their social media following not their skills or musical knowledge.

The market is completely flooded and promotors cannot practically sift through the sheer volume of mixes published online -- so they go by Internet points instead.

[mkovach]

> This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers

I believe that is how they made the final decision on Watson over Mayfield. Oh, wait, I don't think anything can explain that decision.

Also from Cleveland.

Go Guardians! Go Cavs!

[esseph]

> Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points?

I have personally seen several company CEOs (that were billionaires!) do this in different ways. Sometimes hiring people because of it.

[tombert]

I've gotten recruiters reach out for jobs because of my fairly high Hacker News karma. This isn't speculation on my end, they actually told me that.

I agree it's idiotic; I'm quite confident that it wouldn't be that hard to cheat this system, and even if there absolutely no way to cheat the system, it's not like Hacker News points translate to smartness; my most upvoted posts have basically nothing to do with software engineering.

[zby]

How do you check if a github repo is 'good'?

[copperroof]

Vcs are some of the dumbest people I have ever interacted with. Full stop no exceptions. They are luck, confirmation bias and survivor bias weaponized.