I suppose the leadership team at Uber would be the outlier (at least the media would have us believe)? But then again, perhaps most of them aren't "founders" but hired guns.
I agree and disagree with this point. The absolute worse thing a startup can do is to "flip"/"redo" their code base, in an attempt to clean it up. We learned that the hard way last year. That said, going through code and occasionally cleaning a class or two in order to achieve a desired feature can save time while debugging, usually a lot.
This is like most things in life, taken in moderation = good for you, but the extreme might kill you (or in this case, your startup).
I would say so. My understanding is most of finance is more about who you know than anything else. This understanding comes from my work in the legal industry and having high-powered and incredibly wealthy clients. The product we were selling (legal services) wasn't any better than what was down the street but because of personal connections we got the business and it seemed that way for most of the deals that revolved around their (wealthy people's) decisions.
I specifically dealt with legalities of financial matters of the very wealthy.
edit... I'd like to add that the majority of my clients didn't have the time or the willingness to do their own research on the vast majority of their personal finances. Instead they would use people they trust at specific institutions and give little thought after that.
Its hard for me be believe that people with a lot of money whose only job in life is to figure out how not to lose it do not do their research. There has to be deeper reason.
I have a friend who is a successful business person and know some others - none in the finance industry.
These are just observations from a tiny sample size. First I am surprised that none understand the finance industry; understandable since they were too buzy building a business to worry about anything but cashflow. More importantly is that I think they all suffer from a cogitative bias - they all ignore survivorship bias and believe they can beat the "system" which makes them susceptible to slick finance sales pitches. That sounds a bit cruel - i don't mean it to be; the same attitude got them to where they are.
No; the institutional investors (pensions, endowments, trusts, etc) who are largely the ones buying these hedge funds are just as much a part of the game as the hedge funds themselves.
