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Conspiracy theories, startups and skepticism
tl;dr read some stuff , i am kinda skpetical of outlier startup founders being totally honest, but still will pursue this path lol
For the longest time, I have simply laughed at people like Alex Jones or David Icke because the Lizard and male supplements are obvious telltales of something being off. Something changed recently thanks to Twitter.
Ryan Breslow was one of the youngest billionaires. Stanford dropout started bolt, on the surface he sounds like the ideal YC candidate because no matter what Paul Graham may tell you, they absolutely care about your uni, especially Stanford, a cs undergrad dropout from there is about as blue chip a prospect you can be. Yet he never got in. Bolt was worth billions in 2022 and Ryan was doing well, one day he probably took more drugs than usual and went on a tirade against VCs. Pointing out how YC and Paul Graham (PG) wronged him as Bolt would go against Stripe run by Pauls golden boys. He also pointed out the Instacart incident where the VC firm Sequioa got Instacarts CFO as a partner so that he could make a report nitpicking the firms issue which would help them oust their founder and CEO as sequioa wanted them to IPO but the CEO did not. Well the dude got replaced and instacart IPOd.
Here is the interesting part, Ryan later nuked all of this. His allegations about VCs and the startup world being cliques came true because not only did he "leave" bolt but he got lawsuits and is worth way less than a billion now. The strange thing is, there are zero articles, videos, discussions, HN comments or even tweets about this. At first, I was fairly convinced that this is because Ryan is not important but Bolt is worth more than Mistral or every single LLM wrapper put together. PG does have favorites who are objectively bad people. Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.
Here is where the conspiracies start, I read some stuff on chuckstack.com which prompted this thread. Charles C. Johnson is not a very good source of news which should not discourage us from throwing out everything he says. He gets a lot wrong but he clearly gets stuff right too. His posts on Thiel having worked for the FBI and how he stopped donating money the moment one of his boyfriends died under mysterious circumstances raise good points. He is also the first to mention the ties Andreesen Horowitz have to Saudis for raising money.
Edit - i could not find his post so posting the source he cited here
Now I am a middling or below middling wannabe tech startup guy in case you guys did not follow my previous accounts (u/practical_romantic being the latest before this one). My reason for pointing this out is to not be that one guy who blames everyone else for not succeeding, plenty of people do make a fuck ton of money despite zero help of any kind. I simply wish to put these as an example of the fact that there is a good possibility of there being far more happening at the very top of the VC/ founder space that we are totally in the dark about.
Human beings innately desire heroes in some capacity, Achilles in the Iliad is seen as a martyr however Aidan Maclear has a different reading where he points out that in the Odyssey, Achilles tells Odysseus that he regretted dying in the war for the higher good, thus him being a martyr is an incomplete reading as martyrs see their sacrifice as an honourable thing. My people have for the longest time considered Martyrdom or Veergati (our word for it) as the highest deed one can do besides ofc winning the war. Similarly, I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.
My relatives who work in politics and intelligence agencies share a similar nihilistic view towards the world and how most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated. The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world whereas the BJP is hyper-leftist, the first people or party to actively promote BR Ambedkar as a pan-national icon and pay people of lower castes to marry into higher castes. No publication that is popular or any public intellectual pieces this together. Nearly 100 percent of all Indians cannot see reality this way but it is pretty obvious when you take an objective look at things from a detached perspective.
Same goes for electoral politics. The average election has had enough booth capturing and suspect things happening that it would be considered rigged by Western standards yet you cannot prove it empirically. The west is not third world so me being skeptical may only make sense here but the underlying skepticism makes me not take anything at face value. Its not that you cant rig elections because of values but its always a question of how much you can get away with. How much of what is true, I am not sure, I just wanted to ask you guys for an honest opinion.
The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.
I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.
The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.
I do wish to know more about this, there are barely any accounts on any of this at all but people on the inside are extremely tight. For instance, I do not know how Elon Musk can tweet at all hours of the day, play video games and still be involved in various firms, even part-time involvement in 4 different firms is enough to chew you out completely even if you work more than the hard-working Investment Banking guy. He probably is passive in what he does because I don't know how else you can do all that and still spend so much time online. These are not agencies that outsource Web Jobs to Indians, they are hard-tech firms, even if you spend 25 hours a week on one, you still get 48 hours for the rest of your week where you have to eat 21 times, meet your dozen kids, play your video game, tweet at all hours, go on podcasts and now work with the government.
I bring this up because I am certain that a lot of what we are told has pr spin on it combined with our innate desire to have heroes. You would rather want to believe that he does this and more than be told that a lot of what we are told is given charitable spins for preserivng ones image. He is certainly fairly capable, beyond what most people can comprehend but I doubt he is newton, far from it.
Apparently, he has quite a few more of them with him, his mistress (feel weird using it for a guy) did tell people that he was under threat a few days before his demise. Thiel got contracts even after 2020, donatng this time around would most certainly been helpful.
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