Counterpoint to “had one looked into SBF activities with due diligence in mind, questionable behavior would be obvious to see”:
Many high profile VC firms invested in FTX (e.g. Sequoia, SoftBank, BlackRock). They raised at astronomical valuations as recently as January of this year. It seems unlikely to me that any due diligence into the inner workings of the business by EA higher-ups would have come up with something that these VCs apparently did not.
OTOH, I’ve been following crypto closely for a little over a year now and I had heard rumblings along the lines of the top-level comment. It is my impression that most (maybe all) of the assumptions of bad behavior were based on speculation and circumstantial evidence rather than hard proof.
Perhaps that speculation and circumstantial evidence was enough to be careful with too closely associating with SBF/FTX, I don’t know, but it seems unlikely to me that due diligence before the last few days would have revealed obvious bad behavior.
Counterpoint to this: a lot of VC investments in crypto were very dodgy. I can’t recall exact project names, but I remember regularly seeing news of the form “a16z just backed us with 300M!” on projects which are clearly zero-sum and don’t have the market cap to generate >300M in fees, like blockchain games. VC investment doesn’t seem like as strong a signal in the crypto space as in other spaces.
This seems to be a case for ‘trust but verify’ - it’s also worth remembering that reputational risk and purposes rebound differently for different participants.
Counterpoint to “had one looked into SBF activities with due diligence in mind, questionable behavior would be obvious to see”:
Many high profile VC firms invested in FTX (e.g. Sequoia, SoftBank, BlackRock). They raised at astronomical valuations as recently as January of this year. It seems unlikely to me that any due diligence into the inner workings of the business by EA higher-ups would have come up with something that these VCs apparently did not.
OTOH, I’ve been following crypto closely for a little over a year now and I had heard rumblings along the lines of the top-level comment. It is my impression that most (maybe all) of the assumptions of bad behavior were based on speculation and circumstantial evidence rather than hard proof.
Perhaps that speculation and circumstantial evidence was enough to be careful with too closely associating with SBF/FTX, I don’t know, but it seems unlikely to me that due diligence before the last few days would have revealed obvious bad behavior.
Counterpoint to this: a lot of VC investments in crypto were very dodgy. I can’t recall exact project names, but I remember regularly seeing news of the form “a16z just backed us with 300M!” on projects which are clearly zero-sum and don’t have the market cap to generate >300M in fees, like blockchain games. VC investment doesn’t seem like as strong a signal in the crypto space as in other spaces.
This seems to be a case for ‘trust but verify’ - it’s also worth remembering that reputational risk and purposes rebound differently for different participants.