Sequoia took a major L with that post.

It was a massive 90 minute listen. Even if he wasn’t a scam artist this would still be too long of a profile.

Did they? The way I read it Sequoia bought ~$200m of magic beans from FTX, but in exchange banksman fraud invested ~$200mil back in Sequoia ventures.

That's a wash-bet. Nothing was gained.

Magic beans gained market cap and valuation.

Presumably Sequoia wouldn't have done it if they weren't getting anything out of it. Is it too crazy to assume that they agreed to invest ~200M, in return for ~200M back and a percent of some token or stream? Both they and SBF would know a 200M investment would attract serious attention and retail buyers but both would need the other to make the headline.

I don't want to sound too conspiratorial but seems odd they would bother to do a transaction for this while lending their name unless they were getting something back.

when Elon Musk talks about 'citizen journalism' disrupting the media, that post is what he means ... 'private historians' and puffers employed by VCs and oligarchs controlling the narrative.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591121142961799168

In this case it doesn't seem to matter whether the puffer is employed by a VC or the New York Times.

my personal view is, it does matter.

the biggest problem with NYT is they bend over backwards to appear neutral and give all sides the benefit of the doubt. it becomes doublespeak and provides cover for bad faith. for instance today's article on SBF - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankma... . it's an embarrassment to let him call looting client funds 'a margin position' without hard pushback.

but in the NYT they distinguish fact from opinion, and take reasonable steps to verify the stuff they print as fact. so even if they don't discount what SBF says as they should and draw the appropriate conclusions, a critical reader can. (even if it's while they are yelling at the screen)

so they are not going to print something like the Sequoia garbage that is completely one-sided, with technical absurdities and factual inaccuracies (and they will edit and copy-edit properly).

people say the NYT is 'biased' but I think that accusation is misguided. Of course they have a point of view (like, democracy and government are usually good good). the word 'bias' presumes the existence of some unbiased reference frame like 19th century ether theory. many people who call things 'biased' are just announcing, my own point of view is the one that must be privileged.

the question is not, do they have a point of view, but what is the point of view, is it transparent, do they check facts and distinguish between fact and opinion and dig regardless of who benefits.

the crap media is this stuff that prints bogus facts, is one-sided and self-serving, doesn't distinguish between fact and opinion.

and yes, it's important to note that Musk and other people want to control the narrative with their own crap media like this, and a Twitter zone flooded with BS.

Why is everything about Elon musk?

Is this the new Trump Derangement Syndrome?

As ridiculous as that article was, the deletion is worse. Decentralized write-only communication that "cannot" be deleted is foundational to establishing trust in the crypto space (at least as it was originally envisoned). How does one claim to empower change for the good by backing projects in this space, and yet try and make something vanish if it shows them in a bad light? If anything, this should go right at the top of an anti-portfolio as a counter-balance when business cycles are inevitably looping back into insanity territory.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... (linking it here because this deserves to be preserved as a cautionary tale in our collective memory)

We don’t need decentralized write-only communication. People have memories and reputation have power, and technical solutions aren’t going to change that.

What the crypto folks need to do to gain trust is stop behaving as though a lack of decentralized write-only communication means they can say whatever they want and nobody will remember the times they were wildly wrong.

Wouldn't a real newspaper fulfill the "decentralized, write-only" model?

Even if entirely objective in the presentation of "just the facts", merely through the act of curation (what is noteworthy enough to appear in the paper), we make memory selective, and therefore biased. Interesting that real newspapers did serve as "proof of date" until very recently but generative AI might puncture that.

There needs to be some sort of curation or else you run out of paper.

But Sequoia Capital isn't a newspaper. They are not under any obligation to retain puff pieces on their investments. Arguing that there should be a "write-only" register (aka blockchain) is arguing that anything written in the space, ever, should be immortalized on it. Which doesn't seem like a great idea to me.

As other comments point out, the Print Screen key, "Save to PDF", and archive.org are all you really need.

They have every right to delete the puff piece. Saying that the deletion punctures their credibility and posturing significantly more than the article itself. Things will go south in some high-risk venture investments. Owning up to the mistakes at least messages that there is learning. Would be interesting to see other VCs take on this.

I don’t think the parent is arguing for a blockchain one journalism, just that outlets claiming to be “news” should own their mistakes if they want to retain credibility.

I think GGP is conflating "we commissioned an article from an established journalist" with the article being "news". Adtorials, or whatever they're called, have been quite the thing lately and I don't see how this is any different, except inverted.

You’re right, it’s not a news agency, however it is masquerading as one to try and increase their legitimacy. It’s reasonable to criticise their behaviour.

Let's be clear: Alfred Lin championed the investment in FTX. It's not Sequoia. It's a limited number of partners.

While bad press and shaming them is ok, what should really happen is Sequoia should be investigated closely and punished if found guilty. The money trail needs to be investigated for bribery, side deals, hiding of information from the public, lack of due diligence etc. In a terrorist attack the money trail is investigated. Same applies here.

> lack of due diligence

From everything we're learning, the writing was on the wall from day 1; these people were just enchanted by it.

Why is this article hiding its hyperlinks? On my iOS all the links are black and indistinguishable from the rest of the text.

Anchor links are underlined with a very thin grey line... Easy to make out with my eagle-like vision after zooming in.

Is there any Silicon Valley personality left who has an unquestionable/undamaged credibility/legacy ?

Erlich Bachman who founded airfare collator Aviato and then sold it seems the real deal. Last I heard he was in Tibet though.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you consider credible is not the same as what others would.

I don’t know if they operate out of Silicon Valley but the Collison brothers seem to be pretty well-respected.

Andrew Iguodala, maybe

At some level, these big name funds also deserve some portion of the blame. A lot of people implicitly trusted FTX because of its backers. Even when the first signs of FTX imploding emerged, some people chose to stick with it because “Blackrock, Softbank and Sequoia can’t be that wrong”.

Little did they know that the due diligence process for Sequoia wasn’t any better than any random no-name fund.

SoftBank’s ignored the results of some due diligence before (WeWork)

An investment firm writes a puff piece about one of their investments, investment tanks, they delete the puff piece. Yeah they have no integrity when it comes to their image. Not sure who is shocked by that.

Everyone is now saying "wow that article was tone-deaf before, now it is ridiculous".

But where are all the criticisms from before? While FTX was a multi-billion business, seemingly everyone kept quiet. Only when they went tits up suddenly everyone remembered how it was always a bad article.