You are angry about something. You are
angry with me about something, but you
have no reason to be.

At

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624067

is the thread

> Our Odd Startup: 3½ Guys, No VC,
Profitability, and Patience

and I responded with

> My Odd Startup!

> One guy, no VC, patience, problem
identified, for solution, crucial secret
sauce found and scalable, production
quality code written, alpha test in
progress, meager burn rate, no users or
revenue yet.

that is, I responded in kind, and you got
angry.

So, you post a list of unjustified,
pejorative remarks about my behavior:

> play coy

> flog dissatisfaction

> throw out outrageous

> rile people up

Then you posted

> Microsoft's frankly very irritating old
developer tools.

That's uninformed: You must have in mind
Microsoft's old Visual Basic, not Visual
Basic .NET.

Look, in case it is not fully clear yet,
at their Web sites US information
technology VCs, apparently nearly all of
them, are seriously, deliberately, and
harmfully deceiving entrepreneurs. Hacker
News readers should be aware of this fact.

The situation is not particular to me but
to nearly every entrepreneur in the world
who visits the Web sites.

Here is their deception: They claim to
fund information technology entrepreneurs
and list their criteria. But their lists
are deliberately deceptive because they
refuse to list the most important parts of
their criteria. Here are five items,
apparently important to crucial, of their
criteria they refuse to list:

(1) Likely and apparently, the most
important item of their criteria is that
the entrepreneur's project must have
traction or revenue or earnings
significant and growing rapidly.

(2) Likely and apparently, one item of
their criteria is that they regard any
contact directly by an entrepreneur as
"from over the transom" (there is some
scatological symbolism here) and refuse to
consider it.

(3) Likely and apparently, they nearly
always insist on a "team" of several
persons and will automatically reject a
sole founder.

(4) They want an entrepreneur to have
"references". But having references from
CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and
Presidents of some of the world's best
research universities don't count.

(5) They claim to want highly qualified
entrepreneurs, but the qualifications they
want would not help a person get admitted
to a STEM field Ph.D. program, be hired
for a tenure track position in a STEM
field at a research university, etc. And
peer reviewed published papers in a STEM
field and relevant to the entrepreneur's
company don't count, either.

Of these five, likely the most important
is the first one, traction.

E.g., I posted the statement from venture
firm USV:

> If you’re a founder or potential founder
building something transformational, I’m
so eager to meet you. I’m on a new
adventure and I’m ready to dive into
yours, too. You can reach me at
Rebecca@USV.com.

So, here she says "potential founder"
implying that she wants to hear from
persons, including single persons and not
necessarily a team, who are not yet
founders. So, they won't yet have
traction, etc.

She says "building" and not "have built".
So she is considering work in progress.

Then she says:

"I’m so eager to meet you." I can't
believe that.

So, I wrote her. Never heard back anything.

Her statement is just an example of the
theme: VCs won't say what their real
criteria are, and this is clearly both
deceptive and deliberate.

Entrepreneurs are being hurt because they
take the VC bait and invest time and
effort in responding for no good reason.

Again, here is how this VC deliberate
deception hurts entrepreneurs:

VCs don't want to say this, but
entrepreneurs need to know it or do what I
did -- jerk the chains of nearly every VC
on both US coasts with pitches of every
style all for no good reason.

Again, that VCs want traction is, thus, a
fairly solid conclusion and really
important for entrepreneurs to know about
VCs.

> Okay, if an I-told-you-so is your long
game then fine.

No it's not my "long game". It's just a
small side issue and a way maybe
eventually to make a point that should
help entrepreneurs: If I am successful,
then I will be able to claim that I long
tried to get VCs interested and they never
were. So, the lesson for entrepreneurs
is, VC don't know how to pick good
projects, and entrepreneurs should invest
little or no time and effort in contacting
VCs.

Am I angry with VCs for their deliberate
and harmful deception? Yes. But I'm not
as angry as you are with what I posted
that harmed you not at all.

You continued with your pejorative and just
plain wrong remarks:

> crackpot rant

> inscrutable diatribe

> You have this major axe to grind with
VCs, I don't judge that (have plenty of
sour grapes myself), but what are you to
gain from publishing an inscrutable
diatribe?

As I explained, I am in line to help other
entrepreneurs.

> look crazy.

Not at all. The VCs are being
deliberately deceptive and harmful, and I
am warning entrepreneurs.

For your

> But here's the problem: all these words
are absolutely meaningless outside your
private context.

It's not my "private context" at all.
What is on the VC Web sites is
deliberately deceptive and harmful bait to
nearly all the entrepreneurs and not just
to me. What the VCs are doing is not
about me; I'm just one example, but what
the VCs are doing is quite general.

Clearly you didn't know the information
about VCs I provided. So, I was doing
you, along with all Hacker News readers, a
favor. Your response was to become angry
with what I wrote and attack me
personally.

Your attacking what I posted looks
"crazy".

My view is that until the VCs improve
their ability to evaluate projects and the
LPs let such VCs use their judgment,
information technology VC is on the way
out of business. E.g., long on average
their ROI has not been good. And the
world of information technology startups
has changed so much that the old VC and LP
approaches will no longer work.

In business, one of the most important
decisions a founder makes is whom else to
work with. Well, then, no good
information technology entrepreneurs
should want to report to a BoD of VCs --
they just don't have the "right stuff".