Hey Silicon Valley, Leave Those Kids Alone! Study the Real History of Venture Capital and GAMA
Hey Silicon Valley, Leave Those Kids Alone! Study the Real History of Venture Capital and GAMA
How many Sons of the American Revolution are there in the board room? And what happened to the Jewish American patriots?
You stole our deep state technology — so be ready for it to be stolen back.
If I have treated Marc Andreessen with kid gloves it’s because he’s a kid — albeit an overgrown one.
But there’s a nagging thought I’ve been having, especially as I read a Fortune profile of Josh Kushner and when I listened to an interview between venture capitalist Sam Lessin and Erik Torenberg.
What if all this pretense of technological innovation is actually just mob money laundering?
In that Fortune profile Roelof Botha’s quoted as saying that there probably aren’t that many places to deploy capital. What Botha leaves out is that there probably aren’t many places where Sequoia — a Chinese front Botha manages — is allowed to deploy capital.
Lessin puts it slightly differently. He argues that the 1970s was a phenomenal time to be born and that we’re essentially nailing those leftovers. Maybe so.
But the macroeconomics created those companies too.
Indeed it doesn’t get a lot of attention how Microsoft (founded April 4, 1975) and Apple (founded April 1, 1976) were essentially founded during the Ford/Carter presidency. At a time of real uncertainty in the country’s political system technology starts taking off.
I’d argue that Lessin and crew were very much a byproduct of the ethnic nepotism which overwhelmed American society after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We’ve talked about that before in my piece on the constructs and the role of Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook has started to collapse and it is now no longer worth a trillion.
So here we have two companies — Apple (market cap $3.02T) and Microsoft ($2.75T) — which represent the triumph of the 1970s. These are companies continue to affect our discussion even today. We can also include Google (market cap $1.72T) and Amazon ($1.52T), which dominate cloud computing. I’ve called these four companies — GAMA.
All tech investing might be seen as means by which venture capitalists try to get these four companies — GAMA — to acquire their portfolio companies.
As Lessin tells it Open AI hasn’t really proven itself but that hasn’t stopped Satya Nadella from putting billions behind it. Nadella has seemingly not done the research on Altman’s family ties to organized crime nor does he discuss the relationship between Altman and Peng Xiao and Chinese intelligence.
We might be in the caretaker moment in Microsoft — and that makes them uniquely vulnerable to the mob. The critical analysis that Tim Schwab has done in his new book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, to say nothing of the inquiries into Gates relationship with Jeffrey Epstein or extramarital affairs with subordinates, might make us reconsider a lot of this Gates history. Could it be that his wealth was used to subsidize foreign intelligence and their attacks on the United States? I think we have to take it seriously.
To the extent that there’s such a thing as AI it should be understood as giving permission to companies to do what they’ve already wanted to do — to shed labor costs, not to bring about greater stewardship of public resources.
But the problem isn’t that Silicon Valley has the wrong ideas; it’s that it has elevated the wrong people. There are few children of the Deep State out and about and those few which do exist are often shunted.
It wasn’t always so, as even a cursory glance at the history would have you know.
If you’re interested in such history, I’d recommend VC: A History (2019) for a primer.
But the record is there, looking right back at you if you know your way around Wikipedia.
It seems as if there’s a patriotic Jew partnered up with a WASP which makes it work — Kleiner Perkins and Davis & Rock.
To the extent that tech companies have problems now it’s largely because this alliance isn’t around anymore.
Let’s start with Kleiner Perkins, the venture fund behind Amazon and Google.
Eugene Kleiner. Tied in with Shockley. I hear this Silicon chip might be a big idea—so much so that we wouldn’t be willing to have mob pretenders try to build chips.
Tom Perkins. What was that fight over HP really about? I think it was about Chinese penetration. Read Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins (2008).
Perkins was introduced to Kleiner by none other than Sandy Robertson who would go on to found the very controversial firm, Francisco Partners, which bought NSO Group. I think we should take seriously Perkins’s apparent affection for Shimon Peres, the old prime minister of Israel. Israeli interesting…
So too is how one of Perkins’s initial limited partners was none other than the Rockefellers and Henry Hillman. So there’s a continuation from the oil and steel industry to the Silicon and biotech industry.
We should then consider Arthur Rock and Thomas J. Davis who backed Apple.
There’s been a lot of discussion about Arthur Rock but curiously little detail about Davis. It’s shockingly difficult to get a copy of Davis’s book, One Man’s War—A Boston Lawyer on the Jungle Trails of Burma, and that’s a real shame.
A friend of mine told me that Davis served in the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. This naturally piqued my interest as my favorite science fiction author was fellow SOE member Eric Frank Russell. Davis’s role often doesn’t get much mention. Davis, a native of Cincinnati, was a graduate of Harvard, where he was captain of the polo team, and of Harvard Law School. In World War II he served on the War Production Board, the Lease-Lease Administration, and in the Office of Strategic Services as an Army captain. All told Davis backed some 125 tech companies.
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We’re not supposed to talk about who introduced Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs either — and their ties to the Iran Contra. That would be Bill Fernandez — employee no. 4. at Apple, and whose father, Joseph’s biography, has to be read to be believed.
Joseph Fernandez was the Central Intelligence Agency station chief for Costa Rica. The charges against him stemmed from his support of NSC staff member Oliver North's Contra aid network, despite the Boland Amendments, which prevented the CIA from helping “in the planning or execution of military operations” relating to the Contras, as well as in the “logistics activities integral to such operations.”
In August 1985, Fernandez worked with North and private Contra benefactor (and former CIA operative) Rafael Quintero to build an airstrip in a remote area of Costa Rica. The purpose of this strip was for emergency landings and to allow Contra-supply planes to refuel on the way to the base in El Salvador. In addition, through an NSC communication device North had given him, Fernandez informed them both about the Contras' needs, as well as flight path and drop-off coordinates. Fernandez even enlisted CIA field personnel in 1986 to select the best drop-off sites and share that information with him; he then passed that knowledge on to Quintero and North.
After the crash of Eugene Hasenfus's plane, which was carrying weapons to the Contras, Fernandez asked a Department of State employee to remove records of his phone calls with North and Quintero, of which there were hundreds. The employee placed them in a personal safe.
In early 1987, Fernandez was repeatedly interviewed and consistently provided false information, leading to his indictment. Walsh indicted him on the grounds that he falsely claimed the airstrip was a Costa Rican initiative designed to defend against possible Nicaraguan invasion rather than to refuel supply planes. He also claimed that he only spoke with Quintero regarding supply planes, failing to mention their collaboration on the airstrip project. Finally, he claimed that he did not know that North was involved at all with the Contra aid network or that the flights in September 1986 contained weapons.
The Steve Jobs hagiography is a bit annoying but what do you expect from Walter Isaacson? Jobs’s natural father Jandali lived with relatives, including the UN ambassador to Syria. We’re supposed to believe that Jobs, like Bezos, was just a guy who pulled himself up from obscurity.
Never you mind that Bezos’s grandfather — Lawrence Gise — was deputy director of DARPA and Assistant Director, Division of Military Applications, Atomic Energy Commission. Gise was even implicated in the Israeli theft of uranium during his tenure.
Isn’t it interesting that Gise’s grandson — Jeff Bezos — would get the cloud contracts for the CIA and the NSA? That connection with energy is critically important to understanding the cloud computing space. Cheap energy means cheap storage.
These government and later venture capital were funding real companies doing real things in the world. Oil. Medicine. High technology. Georges Doriot — the so-called father of venture capital — had a pivotal role in putting the Bush family in the offshore oil business. We obviously know what they went on to do.
I have lunch routinely with a diabetic friend of mine. I cherish his friendship. That shit is real. Thank you Kleiner Perkins (and thank you, Joe Biden for reducing the price of diabetes drugs).
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The bullshitting venture capitalists build their cults.
But we have a bunch of bullshitters running the discourse now and it’s easy to think that maybe those people were chosen to be a sort of overclass over the rest of us. Selected as children they have seemingly more in common with the child stars many of them are than the deep state nerds of yesteryear.
Above all else, these types want to be thought leaders. There’s a scene in the book The Founders where someone visiting Elon Musk notes him studying all these American industrialists. Both Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman debated on local public access TV.
To be thought of a guru is to attract followers to your cult — and their money, talent, and time. Mythmaking beats working for a living and you’ll find there are more than a few Americans who are susceptible.
Who better than the upper middle class scions of the American elite? That is, after all, the purpose of the Thiel fellowship. Thiel’s bribes “investments” in Ric Grenell’s husband’s company or Johnny McEntee’s fake dating site should be seen in that way.
To treat these cult-like ideas as if they are worthy of debate is to elevate them to a position they do not deserve because they have not earned it. You can’t be a thought leader if your thoughts lead to bad outcomes. There’s also this effort to explain the difference between effective altruism and effective altruism as if they aren’t both cults.
What on Earth? Refuse this distraction op.
Which brings me to Marc Andreessen, the whiz kid turned whiz man.
When the whiz kid grows up he becomes a whiz man, yes, but he also becomes a bullshitter.
This is where we are with Marc Andreessen. I suspect that Andreessen was himself abused and that his fantasies have been part of an elaborate cover.
I see it all.
The escapist energy.
The dislike of the rules.
The feigned patriotism to a country he doesn’t much know.
The hypocrisy.
The relentless hype.
It’s time to build he says while buying his Malibu mansions — a spending spree he went on after his deceased father in law told him that the real money was in real estate.
The Ben Horowitz story is a bit more complicated but nonetheless worthy of attention. Here was a Jewish kid, from Russian-tied, Chinese-tied, communist parents hoping to capture that certain Midwesternerness. This is Chisrael, okay? We’ve been on this.
It’s easy to see that Andreessen doesn’t have the best relationship with his parents. He seldom mentions them.
In a better age our system would recruit such young men — lonely — and press them into the service.
Instead youth becomes the cover for the operation.
Once the psychological profile is complete the looting begins.
They install a few people there. Or here.
Maybe the purpose of the Thiel fellows is to misdirect young people.
It can’t be a coincidence that right as Sheldon Whitehouse is calling for tightening standards against money laundering at American endowments all the Silicon Valley boys get mad at the colleges for anti-Semitism.
To give you a sense of how much of a shakedown this sort of thing was read the message that Josh Kushner sent the late David Swensen essentialy threatening the Yale endowment manager.
You guys aren’t good investors. You’re just ethnic nepotists.