In a world where it has taken us huge amounts of effort, paperwork, compliance and due diligence to open an office, get licensed and start to launch funds, it is genuinely baffling to watch how a pair of twenty somethings managed to first attract and then seemingly vapourise tens of billions of $ of investor money in an update of a classic bank run-albeit with a modern VC twist.
Tales of how Sam Bankman Fried (perhaps it is simply nominative determinism rather than an anagram at work) not only fried his ‘bank’ but also managed to persuade some of the biggest names in VC to invest at high valuations in an unregulated business based in the Bahamas and yet none of them even wanted a seat on the board are simply extra-ordinary.
Of course the fact that some of them included Softbank and Tiger Global should have been something of a red flag, for as Leo Lewis at the FT put it this week: "But where there is an opportunity to lose money on tech these days, Masayoshi Son still seems one step ahead of the market at having found it ages ago Leo Lewis, FT
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