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VC-istan 1: What is VC-istan?
This is the first part of a series that was originally intended as one post, but will take more. For obvious reasons, I’d rather run five 1000-word posts than one 5000-word post. This assumes that I...
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VC-istan 2: The Racist Judges Problem
Previous: VC-istan 1: What is VC-istan? What is the Racist Judges Problem? Let’s say that there’s a hypothetical country where everyone is either green- or blue-haired. (For this example, that...
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VC-istan 3: Performance
No analysis of VC-istan would be complete without confronting the performance of venture capital as an asset class, which is, by all accounts, terrible. Recall that the VC-istan Hypothesis asserts that...
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VC-istan 4: Silicon Valley’s Tea Party
The SATs might have left people sour on analogies, but here’s one to memorize: VC-funded technology is to Corporate America as the Tea Party is to the Republican Party. I cannot think of a more perfect...
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Software engineer salaries aren’t inflated– at least, not for the 99%
It’s autumn 2013, and there’s a lot of discussion around the current bubble (now obviously one) in the VC-funded technology world and how it will end. Business Insider acknowledges that a bubble...
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Here’s why Paul Graham (probably) owes me an apology.
What I am about to say here is not based on a hunch. I don’t say this kind of stuff lightly, and I will give evidence. Additionally, I make no pretense of knowing whether Graham himself participated in...
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The difference between unfairness and injustice, and why it matters
My last post was about evidence for abuse in Hacker News’s ranking system, but I’ve also written at length on the failings of human organizations, in addition to the moral collapse of the...
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VC-istan 5: Wanting to be loved
It’s easy to put a negative spin on most of what happens in the VC-funded ecosystem (“VC-istan”) but a useful philosophical exercise is to look for positive, or at least forgivable motivations, behind...
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VC-istan 6: The Isms of venture-funded technology
Assessing VC-istan in full requires looking into the “Isms” of which it’s accused: racism, sexism, ageism, and classism. I’ll address each of these, the extent to which they seem to exist, and their...
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An alternate theory of shark-jumping
I’ve watched a fair amount of TV in my life, seen quite a few movies, read a large number of books. A theme that becomes common in creative endeavor is “jumping the shark”, or the decline in creative...
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VC-istan 7: solving the wrong problem
I’ve written at length about VC-istan, its poor performance and its bigotries. What, however, is VC-istan’s “original sin”? Why is it so dysfunctional? Is there a foundational reason for its pattern of...
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Was 2013 a “lost year” for technology? Not necessarily.
The verdict seems to be in. According to the press, 2013 was just a god-awful, embarrassing, downright shameful year for the technology industry, and especially Silicon Valley. Christopher Mims voices...
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The U.S. conservative movement is a failed eugenics project. Here’s why it...
At the heart of the U.S. conservative movement, and most religious conservative movements, is a reproductive agenda. Old-style religious meddling in reproduction had a strong “make more of us”...
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VC-istan 8: the Damaso Effect
Padre Damaso, one of the villains of the Filipino national novel, Noli me Tangere, is one of the most detestable literary characters, as a symbol of both colonial arrogance and severe theological...
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Look-ahead: a likely explanation for female disinterest in VC-funded startups.
There’s been quite a bit of cyber-ink flowing on the question of why so few women are in the software industry, especially at the top, and especially in VC-funded startups. Paul Graham’s comments on...
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If you stop promoting from within, soon you can’t.
I’ve been around and inside of tech companies enough to know that, as a general rule, they don’t promote from within. Why? One VC-specific reason is the extreme amount of power held by venture...
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Some astonishing truths about “job hopping”, and why the stigma is evil.
A company where I know at least 5 people just went through a massive, and mostly botched, reorganization. Details are useless here, but I’m struck by the number of high-functioning people who developed...
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Corporate atheism
Legally and formally, a corporation is a person, with the same rights (life, liberty, and property) that a human is accorded. Whether this is good is hotly debated. In theory, I like the corporate veil...
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Ambition tournament (more like a large game) in San Francisco on March 23
This post pertains to the Ambition tournament planned for the eve of Clojure/West. What?:We’ll be playing the card game, Ambition (follow link for rules) using a modified format capable of handling any...
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The right and wrong way to lie in business, Part 1
There’s a New York Times article entitled “The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies”. According to it, the best strategy for success in business is never to lie. Not surprisingly, few people...
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