Martin Shkreli, Travis Kalanick, this asshole- plus a hundred more behind them getting VC funding despite a complete lack of morals or ethics. In the short run, they win. In the long run, they're toxic and their companies flounder because of it. But still, the VC money flows towards these guys.

I feel kind of gross writing that, for the record, but think it's true.

There's video of him striking his SO 117 times, hopefully he goes to prison and stays there.

>In the short run, they win.

In the current world of high (fake?) valuations, make money fast and now - this strategy wins so it is considered "OK", overlooked or the norm. The fact that it is revealed to be happening in SV is only IMO b/c the industry is so hot now. All eyes on on it. Its also the only real investment/booming industry left in America. I'm sure we saw a lot of this in the past too (80s wall street etc) :(

I'd like to live in a world where we follow the No Assholes rule a little more strictly.

Imagine a scenario where your child is sick and will likely die. There's a handful of doctors in the world capable of treating him/her, the best one frequently says the "n-word", and the rest are 50% worse. Which one will you pick?

Most rational people would pick the one that's better on the metric that matters. The "n-word"-speaking one probably wouldn't get picked to do PR, but if he's a better surgeon, he's a better surgeon.

That's also how investors act. Someone is "better" if they make more money, all things considered.

Your comment sounds like some HN parody.

People that intentionally damage the society on a day job and beat their partners in the evening are not analogical to a politically incorrect doctor.

One problem with Valleywag, or any enterprise that would chronicle these sorts of things, is that while abhorrent behavior by SVites waxes and wanes, the need to push constant volume leads them to be gossipy and vapid. Also, while we might have a substantive discussion about this guy's abhorrent behavior here, a normalized version of that discussion for general consumption may gloss over some aspects of the despicableness of this behavior that require addressing in order to promote higher quality actors in tech.

I'm surprised Gravity4 is still operational, their employees are acting like mini Chahals.

And in addition to all of this, he's also promoting a (likely) scam ICO involving Paris Hilton. Good times!

Curious was the 700 sale a good deal for yahoo at the time. The article spoke of an initial 40 million or 25 million deal that went sour immediately. That probably gave him enough creditability that yahoo felt it could make a 700 dollar deal because this young guy was a rasing talent.

Those who base decisions on credibility vs obserable fact are cheating themselves. Credibility can be gifted as well as earned. For those who have it gifted you begin to rely on a third party who may have relied on a third party.

Yahoo paid 300M, not 700M. It's in the article itself.

Of course, it's still 300M more than they should have.

His $100m cryptocurrency raise will go off without a hitch. When the revenue event is front loaded like that, they will have no need to appease advertisers or conform to any behavioral model to continue doing business.

Of course his lawyers didn't comment, the sale will happen by the end of the month, and nothing else money wise will really matter.

The point of cryptocurrency is that the state couldn't even levy any sanctions against his accounts, even if they had the justification.

So thanks for the informative article.....

My question is thus: was he raised this way or did he become this horrible person once he struck it rich?

Wealth, like power, I imagine, has the same effect.

The reality is, he needs help. No one who is "normal" would do such things. Abnormal (usually) doesn't just happen. That is, there is something somewhere that drives these symptom to the surface. If there's a pattern, it's likely there's a reason(s) for that pattern.

If his personal actions are this morally void, would management turn blind eye to wrong-doing by the company? Breach of client data, etc.

(sidenote: is a "satoshi" the right term for the indivisible unit of a cryptocurrency that's not Bitcoin?)

1. https://youtu.be/dF1NUposXVQ

> he was filmed hitting and kicking his girlfriend 117 times

Some parts of the history sound disonant to me. There was a camera in the room? Why? Who was recording the scene and, If a third people, why he/she keep recording instead to stop and try to help her? Why she do not just walked away and left the room at the second hit? Standing 117 hits without leaving the narrow camera angle is anomalous.

Without a minimum context atached to the video history we can't really know if the man is just a psycho, or is another case of steroids fury, or drugs, or somebody tending a trap (unprobable, but not impossible) to suck as many money as possible from a millionaire, or...

"Chahal's penthouse apartment had a state-of-the-art video surveillance system that on Aug. 5, 2013, filmed Chahal hitting and kicking his girlfriend 117 times..."

Is that good enough for you, or do you need to come up with some more "or..."s? He was recorded beating the hell out of a woman, why on earth are you coming up with hypothetical excuses for him?

I probably shouldn't be surprised that even with video evidence of beatings that some people will still say "we can't be sure, maybe she asked to be beaten".

Of course we must be sure before to put one human in jail, this means that we need to be as cold as we can, study each case separately instead to automatically link all with the discourse of the woman opression around the history, and discard all the other options. Being too much emotional and bursting in revenge's flames do not helps to find the truth in this kind of cases.

A private video surveillance system is good enough for me, yes. It explain a lot of things that would be strange otherwise.