Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Why VCs Aren’t More Brave (mattmaroon.com)
17 points by kf on April 17, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



This is dead on about the copyright infringement.


Saying VC's love startups that infringe copyright is a bit too crass, maybe even dense. They're shooting themselves in the foot with that kind of argument. I think it makes more sense to say VCs value social media startups a lot more; it would just happen that social media has more cases of reproducing protected media than anything.


Yes, I've come to realize that investors who spend the majority of the time asking me about the legality of my startup really don't have any experience with, or understanding of these types of startups.


In the words of pg himself "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by math" ( http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html )


And the solution is simple, remove the annual fees, and/or require that the GP invest their own money into the fund.


Fat chance of that! Not until those funds are driven to death by successful, innovative funds that provide better returns because of better incentives. Even then, there's so much capital out there that the old style funds would still exist.


If there's one thing I learned it's that to drive people to better results you need to align their interests with yours as perfectly as possible.

And I find it astonishing that there is an entire industry whose interests are so far removed from that of their clients. This kind of inefficiency just screams for a disruptive player.


One thing i know is that Matt writes pretty damn well, and he also does a bit of Google search to prepare his posts.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: