I generally agree with you, but in this case SBF
1) hired a high-level person with a long history of fraud (you don’t see Asana or Stripe doing this); and
2) described his own business as a Ponzi scheme (see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankman-fried-described-yield-farming-and-left-matt-levine-stunned ).
It was obvious that he was up to no good.
“But Sequoia”—I’m not convinced that they did any due diligence, judging by what they published on their own website: https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1590394857474109441 It’s not the only occasion when it looks to me like “top” VC firms leapt into investments out of FOMO, with zero effort at due diligence: https://medium.com/swlh/why-are-investors-eager-to-lose-money-on-health-tech-f8c678ccc417
I generally agree with you, but in this case SBF
1) hired a high-level person with a long history of fraud (you don’t see Asana or Stripe doing this); and
2) described his own business as a Ponzi scheme (see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankman-fried-described-yield-farming-and-left-matt-levine-stunned ).
It was obvious that he was up to no good.
“But Sequoia”—I’m not convinced that they did any due diligence, judging by what they published on their own website: https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1590394857474109441 It’s not the only occasion when it looks to me like “top” VC firms leapt into investments out of FOMO, with zero effort at due diligence: https://medium.com/swlh/why-are-investors-eager-to-lose-money-on-health-tech-f8c678ccc417