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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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your CFO

My impression from reading Hacker News comments this past weekend is that even having a CFO is an unfair expectation to levy against a fledgling startup.

Tech world is really coming off as a bunch of little over paid children right now.

A brand new company consisting of 10 tech workers lacks a mature corporate structure and a full C suite. I don't know what else we expect.

Acting like adults. We are talking about Stanford types probably one older mba.

But also referring to all the VC crying on twitter.

The tech world is millions of people in the US alone and not entirely in silicone Valley.

Because a massive bank lied to them and because incompetent federal regulators didn’t catch it?

Should they just have already assumed the government was made up mostly of completely useless rent seeking tyrants? Keep in mind a lot of them are pretty young and may not have figured that out yet.

Judging by the response to SBF, there are lots of pundits who would likely bite that bullet.

The issue here isn't the government. It's running a business with $millions in cash but not having a person familiar with basic corporate finance to help them manage it, as well as not spending a bit of time on investopedia to learn it themselves.

Banks fail. The government has rules in place as to what happens when they do, they require banks to disclose these rules (e.g. FDIC insured up to $250k) and these rules are enforced. Is it your belief that SVB stopped disclosing FDIC insurance limits? SVB is only minimally a story of government being useless/corrupt - at least, it wasn't a story about govt corruption until Yellen/Biden decided to take money from workers and give it (indirectly) to wealthy venture capitalists.

I mean really, is a safe full of one pay-period worth of physical cash too much to ask? Is this how financially illiterate we have become?

These motherfuckers need to eat shit. CFOs won’t get it until they see Roku employees setting up GoFundMe’s for lunch money.

There was a woman at my grandmother’s retirement home who’d worked in a Saudi hospital in the 80s or 90s. She oversaw their payroll switch from carrying in a literal sack of money to the exotic technology of checks. People weren’t used to working with them, but they were a way more efficient solution than handing out cash.

In this scenario is HQ going to mail me an envelope stuffed with cash or do I have to fly to San Francisco and pick it up?

Money orders only, sorry.

George Bailey will be waiting for you in the Bay Area asking if you can hold out a bit

I mean really, is a safe full of one pay-period worth of physical cash too much to ask?

Yes.

it wasn't a story about govt corruption until Yellen/Biden decided to take money from workers and give it (indirectly) to wealthy venture capitalists.

The money to make depositors (who are mostly employers, not VCs) whole is coming from a fund paid into by banks, not taxpayers.

That’s basically the same thing as taxpayers. People who didn’t invest in shit bank have to pay for shit bank.

And the correlation between pays a lot in taxes and has a lot of deposits is likely quite high.

My mistake on whether the funds will be taken from workers or people who deposit money in banks that engage in prudent risk management.

But I guess going forward, there's no point bothering to put your deposits into the reliable banks.

The money to make depositors (who are mostly employers, not VCs)

Who owns these depositors, and has been furiously lobbying the government to protect their asset over the weekend?

The bank didn't lie to them, they published their 10-K (with a full balance sheet on page 95) that clearly showed unrealized losses on their HFM portfolio of $15 billion that nearly exceeded their owners equity of $16.295 billion showing they were nearly insolvent using market prices on Dec 31, or if they were ever forced to sell. Maybe my expectations are too high but if I had more than a million dollars in uninsured assets in a bank I'd be arsed to read through their annual report and be able to do arithmetic.

Should they just have already assumed the government was made up mostly of completely useless rent seeking tyrants? Keep in mind a lot of them are pretty young and may not have figured that out yet.

I'd argue being young is even more reason for them to know. My wife's boomer parents are still living on in the shadow of their upbringing, where they assume the institutions (at least the ones run by Democrats) are unquestionably good, honorable, trustworthy and competent. The continuous rolling systemic weaknesses and disasters of the last 20 years have done absolutely zero to disabuse them of that notion. Where as, I've seen numerous polls that show young people who've grown up knowing nothing but the the absolute clusterfuck of the last 20 years have record low levels of trust in institutions.

All that said, I found this data point which makes me question a lot of that, and maybe come around to your side.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1078192/trust-government-generation-us/

Some of the data points are funny. Like in 2009 after Obama won the presidency, Millennials had a 43% trust in government. That doesn't last. Biden being elected in 2020 results in a fairly large bump in trust for every generation except Millennials. Weirdly enough the data skips straight from Oct 2015 to April 2017, so we don't get a snapshot of the post Trump trust score.

So I donno, looking over the data, it may be hard to tease apart age cohort from political party in power, with younger cohorts generally trusting D's more, and older cohorts seeming to trust R's more. With the seemingly notable exception of Biden. In fact, when I really look at Millennials on the last 20 years of the graph, they do seem abnormally trusting. Once again, with the giant glaring exception of Biden winning office. What's up with that?

Things started notably unraveling under fairly recently and Biden took the blame.

I’m late GenX, and I took “government” class in high school. I’ve heard Boomers talk about “civics” class, but my cohort and younger talk about “social studies” classes. Not a comprehensive answer, just an anecdote which might be a piece of the puzzle.

Millennial here (or at least definitely somewhere between GenX and Zoomer), we indeed had Social Studies (mostly history, maybe also literature) when I was in public school. When I transferred to a charter school, I had more specific history classes. Didn't exactly have civics.

Back in my day we had “social studies” in elementary/middle and “government” in high school. The former was state and national history. Looks like the current requirements have a “social studies” category including history, government, geography and sometimes economics.

I think it’s a catchall term, not a shibboleth.

I'm kind of wondering what value add VC's provide if not giving founders advice on basic skills like this.

The value add is having lots of money and picking which projects they go to. I'm sure the good VCs also provide lots of useful advice but their main economic role is money man.

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