Hmm. I’m by no means the greatest NBA knower but I think in general I’m pretty objective. I’m not always right, but I’m certainly not a homer who just picks Boston no matter the situation. I’ve said all season that they didn’t have it this year, and from the start of the playoffs I expected Milwaukee to knock them out…

Good point. I’m pretty my resume of “I’m not Ernie Grunfeld” would make me a strong candidate over, say, Ernie Grunfeld.

(sorry, Albert)

I stated, here and on Twitter, like dozens of times, that it didn’t matter who won Raps/Sixers because Milwaukee was going to destroy either one and was the only team in the East who had a shot of challenging Golden State, so I just want to use this space to say: I am an idiot, and this is one of several reasons why I…

I felt like Toronto got better as they went along, too. They really leaned into their defense and used it to open up opportunities both at home and on the road. They were a very good regular season team that kicked it up to great in the playoffs, and they deserved this championship. Good on them, and I’m happy for all…

As we’re still mathematically likely to see in Toronto ... it might be worth a one year rental if it brings Boston a championship.

Look how totally well she deals with it, too ... because she’s a person for whom this probably happens often. It must be sort of weird to know that basically every few days you’re going to walk into a room and someone’s going to burst into hysterical tears of joy.

I think the reason people still reference “The Chris Farley Show” sketches is because the scenario of meeting your heroes and totally freezing up is something most people can identify with.

curse you, autocorrect ...

I don’t think it’s limited to kids. Witness Tiffany Haddish completely losing her shit when meeting Opera.

I use systems and services all day, every day (Slack, Google, etc) that never would’ve been able to grow to scale without VC. But yes, large chunks of the industry are problematic.

YMMV on whether you consider these “great” or not, but:

Facebook
Twitter
Google
Apple
Paypal
Stripe
eBay
Oculus
Coinbase
AirBnB
Github
Slack

Oh, I agree completely that it’s nothing like roulette. You can’t be good at roulette. Or, more accurately, you can’t win money over the long term playing roulette, because it’s a game built to reward the house even if the player has mastered all of the rules. The only gambling you can really be good at is a select…

Not really, no. This country hasn’t been real big on worker protections in several decades, and what protections were established have been chipped away at extensively during those years.

As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, I feel like angel investing has a much higher “non-asshole rich person” ratio than VC does. Both have plenty of good people, but yikes there are a lot of scarily-awful VCs.

Thanks. I’m not nearly as funny as the best commenters on this site, but I try to at least be interesting from time to time!

Yeah, as I mentioned, if your goal is the Fortune 500, you’re probably going to need VC at some point—and I stress at some point because you probably can get started without involving venture funds—but that doesn’t describe the vast, vast majority of businesses people start.

Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I don’t have that reaction to people who angel invest at all. But VC is, as Dante mentions in his comment, basically high-stakes gambling (and like gambling, some people are very good at it). Angel investing feels much more like legit trying to help early entrepreneurs get started,…

PE’s really awful. It dispenses entirely with even the fiction of building any kind of logical business and is just about acquiring assets, wringing dollars out of them, and then leaving someone else (typically common shareholders and, of course, employees) holding the bag while you flee into the night.

I am and did. I think it’s hard to find easy answers to this stuff and I don’t know where the best place is to have a meaningful and impactful discussion on how to handle wealth building and capital investment in a sane, logical manner that allows some level of individual mobility (which I think is valuable) while…

So, I’m not Dante3000, but I’ve worked almost exclusively for startup companies for my entire professional career, and I have Thoughts(tm) on Venture Capitalism.