INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
That money might have previously been spent on acquiring access to underage girls, or murder, or espionage, but now it is being spent on
something productive, something useful
Review reported that Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the famed MIT Media Lab, would have continued to take convicted sex offender
singular cases also connect to the larger story about the U.S
Its amoral view of capital is increasingly clashing with the reality that it matters a whole heck of a lot where that capital comes from
And it is about time that founders and investors take responsibility for cleaning up a capital base that has become more and more squalid
the highest echelons of society while he committed his crimes
Saudi Arabia is the largest investor in Silicon Valley not only because it drives a return and diversifies its oil-dependent economy, but
also because it can Valley-wash the horrific rights abuses and atrocities it commits against all of its citizens, including women, LGBT
people, and immigrants.(But hey, women can drive now, just in time for autonomous vehicles.)This amoral versus moral view of capital is just
the classic debate in philosophy between utilitarianism versus deontological duties, but Silicon Valley has almost exclusively chosen the
former rather than the latter
understandable in context
continues to the present day
I was chatting with a founder this week, and during demo day last week, he got an emailed check for $50,000 from an investor in the audience
It was amazing, he said with exclamation points to me, and it sounded like he just added the check to the pile he had accumulated
Who is this person? Do we know where his capital comes from? Is there going to be some scandal that shocks the startup in a couple of years?
endowments as well as state pension funds.Today though, there are all kinds of sources of capital, with little clarity about where the
Take, for instance, Carlos Ghosn, who once headed Nissan Motors and is currently on trial in Japan for a variety of financial crimes
He has been accused of embezzling millions of dollars for a VC fund run by his son by running a kickback scheme through a Nissan distributor
As the Wall Street Journal reported a little more than a week ago:In March 2015, the Ghosns set up in Delaware an investment vehicle called
Shogun Investments, which Mr
Ghosn described as a fund that would invest in Silicon Valley startups
Ghosn was majority owner while his son, Anthony, held a stake, according to people familiar with the matter
Ghosn, who was about to graduate from Stanford University, was working at the time as chief of staff for Silicon Valley venture capitalist
Joe Lonsdale, providing the elder Mr
Ghosn a close-up view of the tech investment world
The lofty returns had stunned him, according to one of the people.That fund would go on to fund some of the most well-known unicorns in the
was 22 years old at the time.Of that amount, $2 million was for an investment in Grab, a Southeast Asian competitor to Uber Technologies
Ghosn was referring to.I would love a world in which founders asked all the right due diligence questions
I would love for them to inquire about limited partners, about how wealth was created, and how it has been invested
But I am also aware that in what can be a desperate search for funds, those questions may well never get asked in the first place.If you
want to stop the capital laundering taking place every day in the Valley, you have to create active, real-time antidotes
That means stopping it at every point of contact, every single opportunity where it can infect the ecosystem.And so, we need better systems
as a community and as an ecosystem to cleanse ourselves of this dirty money
work and realize they are making money for a bunch of murderers
leaders to take a moral stance here
Lab.Taking responsibility for your capital is part of being a leader of an organization today
Hopefully, the next generation of founders will take a look at Epstein, and Khashoggi, and China, and Ghosn, and the Sacklers, and a whole
host of other case studies and learn from them and change their fundraising practices
