That is obviously not their "early investment thesis", nor what that article says. The circularity in fact is yours: you assume stupidity on the part of others, then find it. (And then mock it, which is presumably the point of the exercise.)

This is a good example of why I think we should add the Principle of Charity [1] to the HN guidelines. That's the one that says you should respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of another's position, not try to knock it down to the weakest. The word "charity" makes it sound like an ethical principle, but it isn't, or needn't be. It's simply that assuming stupidity on the part of others makes for weak discussion.

(FWIW, a stronger plausible interpretation of that passage is this: since our success depends on funding the few companies that generate most of the returns, we need a strategy that gives us an edge in getting to them, so let's focus on promoting ourselves to founders. Maybe that wasn't it, either—it's what I got from skimming the article for just a minute—but if we're practicing the Principle of Charity, it's preferable to a moronic one like "let's only fund winners", chosen because it's easy to caricature.)

1. http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

You're being incredibly unfair. I read the article, and found the parent's comment to be almost a verbatim restatement of what it said.

Your observation that A16Z's tactics were presented as more nuanced than this strategy is also true, but that doesn't make the parent comment wrong, or even "uncharitable". The investment thesis, as presented by the article, is pretty much a truism. I don't find it to be interesting or insightful, and like you, I have to make arguments in my head as to why it might not be inane.

It seems to me that you're carrying one set of opinions about the subject, using them to interpret the issue in the most positive light, and then bludgeoning people who take a more critical view. You can call that "uncharitable", but it seems to me to be a literal interpretation of facts: A16Z's thesis was far less interesting than the tactics needed to get the deal flow to make it work.

> The investment thesis, as presented by the article, is pretty much a truism.

I'll give you this much: what the article says about their 'thesis', in a single throwaway line having nothing to do with the rest of the (long) text, is a truism. Now let's apply the Principle of Charity again. What are the odds that that's because the founders were morons vs. that the article didn't go deeply enough into their investment thinking to say anything interesting about it?

> It seems to me that you're carrying one set of opinions about the subject

What opinions do you have in mind? The one I think I'm carrying is that HN comments shouldn't make uncharitable assumptions to set up caricatures, because that makes for lame, bilious discussion. That's not a small matter, because whatever discussion we have here, it's what we're likely to get more of.

> that makes for lame, bilious discussion

Many of the most learned discussions I see on reddit are in the circlejerk subs. Particularly the "New School" ones.

I partly see your point, but I am going on my recollection of the early splash, which was about everyone being dazzled by a restatement of the Pareto principle as applied to unknowable futures. It is one of my pet peeves that a lot of naked emperors get a lot of publicity. The blood rises, and then, here we are. My fondness for giving into impulse is why I don't use twitter.

That said, I always struggle to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. At work I have a mantra about code I don't like: "I might have done it differently". The coder on the other side of it was doing his or her best. I've seen things that on their face where just flatly crazy and only later learned the reasoning. A lot of them remain crazy, but crazy with a reason for the craziness. The usual missing ingredient is communication, which is why another useful thing to remind myself is "let's go ask".

In general, though, it is a long and widely accepted tradition that the powerful don't need us to be nice to them -- that mockery is one of the few inalienable counterbalances the plebs have against those living on top of the hills.

Benefit of the doubt is something we all struggle to give. I don't mean to single you out personally, and if it seems like I am it's because I know what good, reflective comments you're capable of.

No doubt there's a socio-physiological function to saying bad things about the rich and powerful. It feels good, and you can say literally anything in that genre and get applause (on HN, upvotes). So it's inevitable. But it goes against the mandate of this site, which is "gratify intellectual curiosity". Note how that excludes both other forms of curiosity and other forms of gratification.

There's no political or ideological dimension to this (e.g. pro-VC or anti-VC). For present purposes, none of that matters—what matters is the form of the comment: is it reflexive or reflective? Or, to use your term: is the blood rising? That's what seems to determine discussion quality. If there's a better principle than the Principle of Charity for encoding this distinction in an actionable form, I'd love to know. I haven't seen anything else that comes close.

The Principle of Charity you're espousing suggests to me that people would wander around accusing insufficiently genteel comments of uncharitability. Too many rules attract rules lawyering, which turn the agora into a tedious parody of a courtroom.

My own style of moderation, based on long observation, is very few, very simple rules backed by ruthless and unapologetic moderation. I appreciate your leniency.

I think the answer here is to answer, here, if you disagree. It's humiliating to be corrected in public, I always hate being on the receiving end of it, but if I'm stuck with an impulsive streak then that's just part of thinking out loud on the internet.

In retrospect, "espouse" is a loaded word. Let's pretend I said "advocate".

I'm fine with espousing it.

I don't think the consequences you're worried about are likely. People expressed similar worries when we introduced "avoid gratuitous negativity", which didn't happen; there's marginally less gratuitous negativity (at least I think so) and that's about it.

The falsehood here is in your claim that they said they would only invest in the winning companies.

The NYT article you reference doesn't say anything about them wanting to invest only in winners.

What they've always said is that they need to invest in all the companies that might be winners, knowing that many of them will turn out to be losers, and that in order to ensure they got all the promising companies in their portfolio, they need to be highly founder-friendly.

Indeed, the strategy has a self-determining aspect to it: in order to invest in more winners they also need to invest in more losers, and by ensuring they invest in all the winners, they can afford to fund more losers, which helps to ensure they capture more winners.

Andreessen explains this thoroughly in his EconTalk episode from a couple of years ago [1].

That NYT glossed over this point is their doing, not Andreessen's, but even then you've claimed something that isn't at all true and dang is right to point out that you're capable of much better.

[1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/marc_andreessen.htm...

> What they've always said is that they need to invest in all the companies that might be winners, knowing that many of them will turn out to be losers, and that in order to ensure they got all the promising companies in their portfolio, they need to be highly founder-friendly.

The key phrase here is "all the promising companies". This is the same as "I will bet on the promising horses". It's not a novel strategy.

And how are the promising companies selected? Either a16z selects them, in which case they are trying to pick winners, taking me back to my caricature from earlier. Or they base it on a shotgun approach, selecting anyone who shows up. Then the selection function becomes "which jockey thinks they have the race-winning horse?", which is just another variant of picking winners.

I bounced up and down the long (and very interesting, thank you) interview looking for something more. The closest I found to a thorough explanation was this:

> So, basically, here's the way to think about it in the math. There's about 4000 startups a year, [?] a year, that want to raise venture capital. Of those, maybe 400 will get funded by top venture capital firms. Of those, about 15 will be responsible for over 90% of the profits for that entire year of companies.

Which turned into a conversation about Google which I found myself nodding along to. Then:

> And so it's one of the things, again it goes back to what's humbling about what we do, is--it's limits of knowledge. There are real limits to what you can know. Which, by the way, means that if you are going to operate in the field and if your requirement for investing in something or backing something or going to work for something is you are going to know for sure that it is received[?], you are never going to do anything. There is no return above the risk.

Which is a much more reasonable position.

So now I'm wondering if my whole recollection really is based on the initial publicity.

> dang is right to point out that you're capable of much better.

This gives me flashbacks to every school report I ever got. I'm capable of better and worse. It generally depends on the weather that follows me around.