I’m continually surprised at how many young vc’s there are. how does this happen? a big exit that they segue into vc type of role? how does one even become a vc?
I got in an argument with one this week privately. he was telling me it was “laughable to the point of hysteria” that I strongly felt my entire job would not be replaced by AI. when I asked him what about X,Y, Z aspects of my job I felt ML would have a tough time with, or the fact that my particular job would almost certainly be the first ones to leverage AI to enhance my role (but not replace), all I got was “you dont know what you’re talking about, I invested in (technology that has nothing to do with what we were talking about).”
pretty arrogant to tell the person down in the trenches they dont know about what they do enough to challenge your position, based solely on the fact you… listen to and present investment decks for a living, from what I can gather, which are 99% marketing.
I only tangentially know one and he founded a company in grad school, eventually cashed out pretty young then got together with some other people who did same thing. I have no idea if they have actually been doing this profitably or more a hobby
VC firms employ people who aren’t investing their own cash. LPs are the ones with the actual money, and ultimately they have veto power over deals and stuff, but day to day interactions, especially with smaller investments, are handled by associates.
One does not have to do much to imagine how a board of 12 white men would have acted; 10 of SVB’s 11 directors are white, all of them are rich, and the youngest is 53 years old. SVB’s board, it should be noted, is less diverse than any of the United State’s top five banks, according to their own annual reports.
“Head of Financial Risk at SVB Jay Ersapah might’ve been busy with more important projects at the bank, such as LGBTQ issues, rather than assessing risk,” they tweeted. It should be noted that Ersapah is not the head of financial risk for SVB, just for its UK entity, which was acquired by HSBC for £1 Monday due to the failure of the larger company, but was found to be “without solvency concerns.” In any case, this tweet went viral, and its message was spread far and wide by right-wing pundits.
I’ve actually beaten the S&P 500 by a decent amount over my time investing in individual stocks… and I think day trading is really really dumb and would never quit my day job for it. Just the term ‘day trader’ instantly suggests the strategy is trash entering and exiting the market every day.
I honestly think the whole idea of day trading is marketing material being pushed by the brokerages. It’s hard to imagine a better customer for a brokerage than a ‘day trader’ lol. You’re losing at least a penny a share on the spread + whatever the transaction fees are… if the trade is ‘free’ that’s probably at least another penny a share in slippage even on stocks with a ton of liquidity. It’s super easy to incinerate hundreds of dollars a day just in transaction costs this way.
Because beating the market is easy if you take on more risk and it’s hard to quantify the risk, so people just conclude they are ‘beating the market’ full stop.
There’s also this seductive idea a lot of smart people have that the average person on the other side of the transaction is probably an idiot and you just have to be smarter than them. In some ways this is true, but what they always miss is that, if the ways in which the idiots are wrong are normally distributed around the correct price, it doesn’t matter that they’re individually idiots. The market will find an efficient price.
This is giving the market too much credit. The prices are set by supply and demand full stop. It’s in no danger of being efficient and never has been. This doesn’t mean normies should be picking individual stocks.
