Matt Hackett
Roving engineer
Matt Hackett
Welcome to Dan’s post-apocalyptic cafe! Finest service in all of NeoProvidence.
👋🇯🇵 Tokyo!
But instead of helping process the thousands of donors who showed up to help the victims of Sunday’s mass shooting, Ayala himself became a victim of the gunman who attacked the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Rodolfo Ayala: Blood bank employee - Orlando Sentinel
You will cry, but you have to read these profiles.
(Source: orlandosentinel.com)
Everyone who walked through the doors of Pulse last night showed up pre-terrorized. Fifty people and counting survived a lifetime of cultural terrorism, and then lost their lives in an instant because someone was angry at two men kissing.
(Source: esquire.com)
The trimmings of the 19th and 21st centuries
Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade—demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out.
Most Startups Aren’t Crap
VCs say the darndest things.
Mostly, their jabs and knocks against founders and others VCs are kept behind closed doors. But, occasionally, they’re aired publicly. In the national press.
Like this little gem:
Right now, most of the things VCs have funded are mostly crap and largely worthless.
The cynical reading of this might be that every other VC, save for Chamath’s, is funding crappy startups.
But, there’s another way to think about this brash comment that might be more constructive; namely, this:
VC is crap for most startups.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Or even be controversial.
The data is pretty clear. And tho we celebrate the .07% of VC backed companies who’ve reached Unicorn status, we often dismiss the remaining 99.93% as collateral damage on the road Disruptiontown.
And that’s too bad.
Many of those failed startups represented sincere aspirations from founders to put their own unique dent in the universe. What they’d hoped would be a painkiller in raising VC money to solve some short term challenge around hiring, or sales or growth quickly turns into a gateway drug. And VC money is a powerfully addictive substance.
As with drugs, and as the data highlights, VC money tends to ruin far more companies than it saves.
Rather than heaping blame on “crappy” startups for diverting precious VC dollars from the truly worthy agents of disruption, perhaps VCs should get real about the crappy product they’re offering startups.
Now, that’s a Vanity Fair article I’d like to read.
