notfreeyet

It's always been yes and no. It's class-based.

Yes, the management class (or officer class) is for the pedigreed elite. You're trying to join the manager class and they have a line out the door of people with pedigree. What school did you go to? Yeah, so why would they pick you...they're themselves incompetent so why would they use competence as the criteria? VCs invest almost exclusively invest in this class and so the cycle continues.

The technical class (or soldier class) does all the actual work and so they have to be competent. This is almost entirely meritocratic in Silicon Valley. Anyone even moderately competent can get well paying some job, even if it's not at one of the big adtech companies like Google/Facebook that can afford to mostly require pedigree from even their soldiers.

What's neat about Silicon Valley is that anyone of the technical class can simply promote themselves to the manager class given sufficient effort and luck. This alone is what makes it so special. It's very rare but it does happen.

Yeah HN has anonymous accounts so people can speak more freely. I have a day job and I bet this guy knows the CEO at my company and could probably get me fired. I just want to state my position, not create an escalating personal war with the guy. But if I was wealthy I would call him out in my own name as loudly as possible. In my opinion there are few worse things you can do then try to blackball someone from an industry. I think it's grounds for your own excommunication.

From his own web site:

http://anildash.com/2013/09/my-meeting-with-pax.html

"He flat out said that he wants his startup to be funded and wasn't sure if it'd be possible after all of his, and I replied that it realistically wasn't going to happen without the say-so of someone like me, and I wasn't inclined to give some VC the nod on this. On reflection, I'll be explicit: If you're a venture capitalist, and you invest in Pax's startup without a profound, meaningful and years-long demonstration of responsibility from Pax beforehand, you're complicit in extending the tech industry's awful track record of exclusion, and it's unacceptable."

This is clearly a threat that Anil Dash will make trouble for any VC that funds him. This truly sounds so unethical that it might be criminal extortion.

I have no history or relationship with him. I just came across someone publicly trying to use his power against a fellow founder and I wanted to publicly (and anonymously) despise him for it.

I never mocked this deal. I always thought this was a small price to pay for insurance that Instagram wouldn't subsume Facebook. It was only 1% of Facebook.

But I still think $19 billion was about $17 billion too much for WhatsApp. It's a messaging product that doesn't directly threaten Facebook the way Instagram does. They could have created 10x $1 billion teams to compete and easily done better than what they have with WhatsApp. It seems like a cowardly use of $19 billion. Oculus cost them $2 billion and there are many other breakthroughs that are equally underpriced.

According to this other post this Anil guy has attempted to bully and blackball a founder from our industry.

http://www.lorenfeldman.com/anil-dash-is-a-coward-liar-and-b...

If this is true, and it seems true, no founder in Silicon Valley should do business or in any way support Anil Dash in anything.

I would chastise Joel Spolsky and that other guy too, but it seems unnecessary given the destruction they're inflicting on their own business by letting him run it. Hah.