Conflict of Interest in Venture Capital

This is interesting. But what the author needs to do is explain what he means by conflict of interest. It’s a much-abused term. It involves threats to impartial judgment. So what the author needs to do is to specify who is supposed to be exercising judgment on behalf of whom. I suspect he’s right about the problem, but a bit more clarity would go a long way. >>>

Venture capital has a self-dealing problem

This week, I did something very dumb: I got into a Twitter fight with a bunch of venture capitalists.

The proximate cause of my fight was this Wall Street Journal article about 21, a secretive Bitcoin start-up that has raised $116 million in venture capital, with much of it coming from Silicon Valley mega-firm Andreessen Horowitz. What made this particular story interesting was that 21’s co-founder, Balaji Srinivasan, has a day job as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the same firm that funded his company. I’ve since learned that Srinivasan was working on 21 before he took a job at Andreessen Horowitz (and is moving to a part-time role at the firm in order to focus on 21 full-time), but at the time, the whole thing had the feel of a venture-backed ouroboros. So I tweeted this:….

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