Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Fraudulent investor backs fraudulent projects, gets them to invest in each other to establish fraudulent valuations, drags others into the bubble...

My model of the world is that it's got plenty of dumb money; cons are using the financial infrastructure to fleece 6-figure & 7-figure pots all the time. But smart money is actually pretty good at what it does. I think this'd actually be a tremendously difficult thing to pull off

I think it looks like a clique of people who take each other's word for things, which is what worries me

Theranos is actually a really good counter-example, no?

I don't think it is really. They do a big deal about it not having big name VCs in it, but they didn't exactly raise the alarm and many of them were keen to shoot the messenger. Doesn't raise much confidence for how they behave if it was one of their own.

And when the same scandal shows up in self-driving cars they won't even have the "no true SV investor" excuse

I guess I just have a fundamentally different model for how that world works. If you run a diff on "what VCs are saying" + "what VCs are doing," you get a combo of wait-and-watch positioning w/ cautious optimism & some trendy BSing that the public demands. Which is fine, IMO

I just don't see how Theranos *isn't* a good example of circle-jerk messaging NOT ultimately having a big impact on smart money. I think you're **heavily** discounting something that on the priors is pretty incredible, a hot tech co w/ a multi-$B valuation & almost no VC backing