Tech bro culture at its worst, is still orders of magnitude more socially acceptable than culture are frats, finance bros, law firms, hollywood, sports teams or worst.of.them all : politicians.

That team of people is making the case that they should get funded instead, or brought in as consultants to help ensure that Sequoia, Y Combinator and A16Z don't get dragged back to Congress and yelled at again.

It's called "overriding public interest", and until the bros get their act together -- the big ole Nanny State is going to have to step in, and teach them a thing or two.

You don't have to like it -- but it's hard to see what the mystery is here.

That the numbers in general are so stark (and these percentages only reflect the percentage of companies funded who have at least one Black, Latinx, or woman on the founding team, not even that they are 'led' by them) is worthy of some serious investigation, even if a government task force isn't likely to be the solution.

I don't think just the identities of founders are the only thing broken in the VC model but it's telling that the numbers are SO crazy bad.

Micro-aggressions like using the term "LatinX" don't advance inclusivity.

In France, what was one of the most famous "accelerator" (the Family) used to advice to none white men first time funders to pick a startup idea they can bootstrap because they will face clear (unconscious) discrimination when looking to raise funds...

But then the tech-bros came and sold everyone on the idea that the intarwebs are so new that no one really knows how they'll make money, but they will make money and it will be great. Ads. Turns out it was ads. That's how they make money. Tech companies are really a bit more like media networks; they're just channels for ads. You've probably heard people say things like "eyeballs" and "CPM" and "subscriber growth." It's all related to how many people you can put an ad in front of. The market isn't yet saturated and you're pouring all your income into growing the business, so you make the argument the company's present value is related to its future value discounted by very murky projections of how many more people you can eventually convince to watch your ads. And that's not entirely crazy. GeoCities, Yahoo!, Broadcast.Com are companies familiar with this model. Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen and Sean Fanning rode this business model to glory in the late 1990s.

[stick with me here... i'll eventually get to the point]

But now think about the landscape if you're a VC. You have a bazillion recent Stanford grads wanting you to give them some cash. There are PLENTY of new apps and it's hard to figure out which of these crazy ideas will eventually make money. But there is a metric you can use to start to make sense of it all: Subscriber Growth. If Company A is growing it's subscribers faster than Company B, then Company A has an advantage. If it's product is "sticky" it will benefit from word of mouth and your investment capital will grow faster if you invest it in Company A (all other things being equal.) Somewhere around Y2K people began figuring this out and companies like Six Degrees, Friendster and MySpace were trying to be "sticky."

So it's now the mid-2000s and the value of a company is related to the first derivative of it's subscriber count. Google is getting into "more than just search" to expand it's customer growth numbers. Twitter and Facebook are just now launching, weaving a story for investors about near unlimited subscriber growth. Union Square plunked down a metric boatload of cash for pieces of Twitter, Tumblr, Kickstarter and Etsy.

There's now only one mandate from the investors: grow. The faster you grow, the more valuable you are. Every decision your company makes is viewed through the lens of rapid growth. Subtle UX changes suddenly become important as companies realize subscribers are fickle and won't waste time on a janky site that looks like it's from 1996. Horizontal scaling (and every bit of instrumentation that follows from it) become critical to your company's tech stack. Why do you use Docker and/or AWS? Because it allows you to scale to meet subscriber growth. You can't ignore horizontal scaling and expect people to give you money.

In the old days the idea was to grow the business and IPO (or get bought by a public company) so you can exchange your stock tokens for real cash. But it turns out it takes a long time for a company to run out of new subscribers. It sure would be nice if there were a way to cash out of your startup before going public. And there is. Google the phrase "post-money valuation." If you're a VC and you plunked down $1,000,000 for 20% of a hot startup, it implies the whole company is worth $5,000,000. But the value of the company is always growing as its subscriber base grows. If it's growing super-fast, there may be a LOT of people who want to get in on the investment. And this demand raises the per-share price of the next round of investment. Lets say the company you just invested in becomes SUPER-HOT. Everyone wants a piece. You talk with the financial people at the company and say "hey, your subscriber growth rate is twice what it was in January when we gave you $1M for 20% of the company. So the next 20% you sell should be at least $2,000,000. But there's so many people who want in, why not raise it to $10,000,000 and see who bites." Assuming you can sell 20% of your company for this much, it's valuation is now $50,000,000. As the VC, your previous $1M / 20% investment is now demonstrably worth $10,000,000. Things are worth as much as people will pay for them. And if you do it right, a bit of cash from the next round might flow into your pocket.

And now things get a little complex. There's so much money flowing around because of VC's deep pockets, any half-way reasonable startup is bidded up to stratospheric levels. And if someone pays a bazillion dollars, that's what defines it's present value. But as Yogi Berra once said, "it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." What is the FUTURE VALUE of that investment? You have to keep growing the company's earnings (or it's subscriber count proxy) so you can cash out at the next round.

Everything is now about growth. Should you spend engineers' time refactoring that janky old code? No. Absolutely Not. Get them working on the new feature that will drive more subscribers. Is there any advantage to hiring a CEO who groks the tech? No. The only thing you care about is how well the CEO sells the company to the next round of investors. In fact, it might be a disadvantage if your CEO starts asking questions about the tech and timing feature releases based on rational development schedules.

What we've learned in the last 25 years is increasing your company's growth rate (whether measured in subscribers, eyeballs or revenue) is the only thing that matters. "Tech Bro" CEOs who only worry about sales are not replaced because investors want to see someone who cares about such things in charge. "Engineering" CEOs may still survive, but only to the degree they learn how to be good Tech Bros.

What looks good on a startup CEO's resume? The Haas School. GSB (Stanford's Graduate School of Business). Maybe Sloan if your investors are from Boston. And CEOs bring their bro's with them. VP/ENG is a bro who took a database class once. CTO is a bro who has a WIRED subscription. VP/SALES is a guy your VCs introduced you to, but is still pretty bro-ish.

Tech-bros persist at tech companies because there is not benefit to selecting non-tech-bros. They're not all tech-illiterate, but they're familiar only with the tech bits that lead to subscriber growth. "Technical Debt" is a meaningless concept because by the time they've cashed out, the velocity slow-down it introduces hasn't yet surfaced. "SCRUM" is the preferred method of organizing small teams because there's nothing in the methodology that values "easier to maintain" or "easier to extend" solutions. (Not that you CAN'T do it, it's just that it's not part of any SCRUM training I've ever seen. Engineers ONLY rate stories based on how long they think it'll take to implement. "Easy to maintain" is not a feature of T-Shirts but "size" is.)

What kind of fool would hire a Tech Bro CEO? The kind of fool who knows there's a greater fool right around the corner. It's not so much that Idiocracy is a documentary, it's that understanding the fundamentals of the market your company sells products into is over-rated. Your CEO really should be focused on selling the company to investors, and understanding that market or understanding the engineering used to build the company is secondary.

Think of the CEO role as being surrounded by a semi-permiable membrane. The membrane lets Tech-Bros move in and out, but thoughtful engineering leaders who ask too many questions or have any concern other than growth are blocked. Thermodynamics tells you that even if there were non-tech-bros inside the membrane originally, they've eventually migrate away.

“Embedded Growth Obligator” (may sound more broish in Spanish YMMV)

(Thanks Weinstein!)

In more familiar but less wieldy parlance, it might be “Rationalist non-lifestyle Hustler”

There is a bit of of an accusation of hypocrisy too, that is, YC and its organ HN will say they pander in service of curiosity, but its more like the other way round. (Make things people want! Spread your ideology later!) If thats not in itself a lifestyle its at least a narrow perspective on ikigai— perhaps summarized as “Learn Or Earn”

I would say I am not an example of techbro, because I spend time on replying to your statement without any consideration of the victory conditions.

You would know...

user: TechBro8615 created: December 17, 2019 karma: 4317 about: yo yo yo

No, but seriously, this moniker has it's place, but at a time when we are seeing levels of inflation and costs for basic foodstuffs rising and outpacing wages why the hell aren't we seeing the CEOs of major petrol companies and food producers on the stand?

VC is a pernicious Industry that is made up ofpeople who are more like Banksters than anything resembling a Techbro, so what is the goal here? To expose how the two are equally as toxic to the World economy? I just can't see what anyone gets from this theater to take it seriously.

I feel this is cannon fodder for the masses to distract them from the Roe v Wade decision. It's pathetic and it shouldn't work, but just like how people flocked to see Zuck on the stand and made memes about how robotic he is: it served it's purpose.

https://energycommerce.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings...

And what did it achieve? Gas is still at obscenely priced levels at the same time that businesses are forcing people back into the office.

Hence my view that it's theater more than it is a viable measure in which congress has the ability to force executives to be held accountable for their actions that compromise the national security of a nation, at a time that it is reeling from COVID and fighting a proxy war with Russia! For God's sake they were making baseball players show up to discuss steroid use, if this isn't the definition of banality then I don't know what is.

This isn't about merely about making a profit, the US exports just as much oil/gas as it imports after all, it's about how favorable ties with congress/senate can be seen as things that allowed for things to go back to business as usual after a pathetic display in which no one is held accountable for what will be a reason why the US is/will go into a recession. The same thing happens in bank hearings: I fully expect their to be a similar hearing as Russia defaults on it's debt repayment after JPM and GS bought tons of Russian debt and will need a bailout, but promise to do a better job in the future.