Awake to the Most Competitive Game

I, along with most tech Twitter, watched the public brawl where Ryan Breslow, the founder of Bolt, took a swing at Stripe and Y Combinator, calling them 'Mob Bosses' and outlining their crimes in a thread. He woke up this morning and choose violence against Y Combinator specifically.

It made me think of a Peter Thiel quote in E63 of the All In podcast: "If you aren't allowed to say it, it's probably true."

I do not have a dog in the Stripe fight other than to say that on the contents of the thread, the act of creating the thread itself, and the response: It's all in the game. 

What do I mean?

I interned on the sales and trading desk at Morgan Stanley in the Summer of 2007.  While shadowing a trader, I filled the silence with the following comment with the most earnest, eager beaver voice that you could imagine: 

“It’s so great how we fulfill the role of efficient capital markets by providing liquidity to transactions.” 

That elicited a response.  The trader spun around in his chair.  He looked me straight in the eyes.  Deadpan, he stated: “We are all here for one reason and one reason only: to make as much money as possible. Don’t ever forget that.”

Wall Street was straightforward. 

Later that year, a college friend - a year ahead of me - sat me down to tell me a deep insight that he learned from his early days in VC on Sand Hill Road: 

“In California, if you are at the same party with someone once, you’re friends.  If you meet them one-on-one, you're good friends.  And, if you meet them a second time, you're best friends.”

He wasn’t wrong. 

The subtext is that in Silicon Valley people love pretending.  Pretending that they are changing the world.  Pretending they all know each other more intimately than the rest of us know those in our circles.  Pretending that everyone is close friends.  In reality, the environment is as competitive as Wall Street, if not more so.  

I'm still amused at the pretense in startups about what it is supposedly like versus what it is actually like. 

We are playing the most competitive, highest stakes game of capitalism.  And the people who play the game are playing to win.