I’ve only had time to skim the comments, so apologies if this is elsewhere, but isn’t the issue not so much that EA didn’t have the skills to evaluate FTX; it’s that it didn’t have access to the information?
The difference between EA and Sequoia capital is that Sequoia Capital could demand almost any financial information they wanted and FTX had a strong incentive to comply.
Let’s consider another example: let’s say you had suspicions that Open Phil or Longview were engaged in fraud. What would your next step be? If you sent an email demanding a lot of financial documents, I think they’d be unlikely to reply/send them, and if they did, you couldn’t verify their authenticity.
So I take the point that we need to be more vigilant in the future, most especially about putting people on a pedestal and making them symbolic of EA; and it does sound like a lot of people knew SBF was unpleasant to work with and either weren’t heard or didn’t say anything. But I don’t see how an amorphous movement of individuals could ever have subjected FTX to more scrutiny than someone invested $200m.
I’ve only had time to skim the comments, so apologies if this is elsewhere, but isn’t the issue not so much that EA didn’t have the skills to evaluate FTX; it’s that it didn’t have access to the information?
The difference between EA and Sequoia capital is that Sequoia Capital could demand almost any financial information they wanted and FTX had a strong incentive to comply.
Let’s consider another example: let’s say you had suspicions that Open Phil or Longview were engaged in fraud. What would your next step be? If you sent an email demanding a lot of financial documents, I think they’d be unlikely to reply/send them, and if they did, you couldn’t verify their authenticity.
So I take the point that we need to be more vigilant in the future, most especially about putting people on a pedestal and making them symbolic of EA; and it does sound like a lot of people knew SBF was unpleasant to work with and either weren’t heard or didn’t say anything. But I don’t see how an amorphous movement of individuals could ever have subjected FTX to more scrutiny than someone invested $200m.