my worst VC story:
[unnamed] partner stopped me mid pitch. this was pre-covid so these were all in person
he walked up to me and whispered in my ear "damn ur a hot piece of ass"
he smacked my butt and said he wanted my whole seed round
i was offended and left his bedroom immediately
Just chatted with a guy who has 2 kids, a loving wife, pulls in $350k before bonus, runs 6 miles every morning, owns a 4-bedroom in the West Village, just bought a boat, and is genuinely funny and kind and he still can't find a girlfriend.
Modern dating is so broken.
kind of crazy the only thing they can point to is an 8x increase in LOC (lol) and a correlated subjective self reported sense of increased productivity
meanwhile everyone who actually uses the software says it’s buggier than ever
“So you bootstrapped the whole company?”
“Yeah, I turned it down. Turned down the funding.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I turned it down just to do this, just to grind it out, build it myself.”
“So you had an opportunity to take venture money?”
“Yeah, a term sheet and everything.”
“From who?”
“Yeah, a big fund out in Menlo Park. It was a top-tier firm, though. And they offered me like 15, some shit like 10 billion or something like that, 5 billion, something like that.”
“Wait, wait, wait. A term sheet.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, but not 5 billion dollars. They offered you 5 billion dollars for your seed round?”
“Yeah.”
“For a seed round?”
“Yeah.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Like, what the y’all, like, you know what I’m saying?”
“That’s more than the GDP of a small country.”
“But I was so younger, like, I didn’t know what a cap table was.”
“Are you sure they offered you 5 billion dollars?”
“I turned it down.”
“You didn’t even have a product.”
“It was a SAFE, like, I had to give up equity for this decade.”
“But you would get $5 billion?”
“Yeah.”
“You’d be one of the most valuable companies on earth.”
“It was somewhere, it was in the billions, though.”
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).
It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.
The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.
We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.
I worry.