Scamming Tech Founders

Good morning LPs,

To all my American readers, I hope you had a 4th of July. I celebrated the holiday like I do every year, by sending drunken text messages to all my British friends reminding them that we defeated their empire.

Anyway let’s get into today’s newsletter.

Hard and Fast News

fake headlines, real news

Diddy acquitted of racketeering and sex trafficking charges. “We just wanted him out of the courthouse as quickly as possible, he was making everyone a little uncomfortable.” said the Judge. (NBC)

Trump tours ‘Alligator Alcatraz” before the first resident expected. Trump comments “It’s a very nice facility, maybe the best facility I’ve ever seen. Don’t try to jump the fence to escape though, maybe it worked when you left Mexico but I’m told the gators here will eat you.” (NPR)

Dalai Lama angers Chinese government by confirming he will have a successor after his death. “China has been so busy bullying Taiwan it seems like they have forgotten to bully us Tibetans. Nobody likes to feel left out.” said the Dalai Lama in a press conference. (BBC)

Israel agrees to conditions for a 60 day ceasefire in Gaza. “We don’t have time for a press conference. We need to drop more bombs before the cease fire actually goes into effect.” said Benjamin Netanyahu in a brief statement to the press. (AP)

The Legend of Soham Parekh

Last week news broke about a software engineer, Soham Parekh, who was caught working for upwards of 10 startups in silicon valley at the same time. Dozens of startup CEOs took to social media to share stories of either employing or interviewing Soham for positions at their companies. 

This is exactly what silicon valley and startup culture deserves, and if you think otherwise you’re a fool. We spent the last 10 years giving 23 year old college dropouts without any managerial experience billions of dollars to start companies that we know are guaranteed to fail. Then we expected them to “hire fast” and onboard dozens of qualified engineers to their team so they can beat their competition of equally unprofitable 23 year old run startups. 

What’s ironic is that during the 2 years before these 20 something year old founders started companies, they were suckling on the teet of Microsoft while only working 2 hours a day. Now that they’re the Microsoft in the relationship, they’re pissed. For real, everyone I know that works at google works 7 hours a week, plays office ping pong, and goes on pickleball retreats with their coworkers. If that’s what’s going on at the gold standard tech industry mega-corp, what do you think is happening at your 18 person guaranteed to fail startup? I’ll put it this way, despite your job description saying, “be prepared to work in the trenches” no one is putting in long hours when they know your company is going to zero in 22 months. 

If Jamie Dimon asked me to stay until 11pm to get a fat bonus at the end of the year, I’d work overtime. But if an MIT grad who’s building a dating app for people who love fish tells me I need to grind to get an extra .3% equity I’m drinking beer by noon everyday. 

Here’s the deal. The tech industry lied to people for years, telling engineers that working for $110k/year when they could make $350k/year at Citadel was worth it because of the .5% of equity they’d receive. And someday when the company IPO’d like Airbnb they would get rich. But this doesn’t happen to 98% of startup engineers. Instead they work for dogshit companies, for below market rate salaries, and it takes until their mid 30s for them to realize that they’re not hitting the lottery. So right when they want to have kids, they waddle with their tail between their legs to take a cushy job at Google and make the $350k/year that they should have been making the whole time. 

Soham Parekh just realized that most startups are run by dinguses. And if he couldn’t get the cushy job at Google, then he may as well scam a couple of 23 year old’s before the money runs out. In the words of the great George W. Bush, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can’t get fooled again”. 

If you refer 5 people to Jabroni Capital I’ll write you an unhinged LinkedIn recommendation and feature it in the newsletter.

Memes

This is some of the wildest startup promotion I’ve seen.

jabronicap

24K followers

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It’s time to lock-in and start scamming people.

jabronicap

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All I see is a very happy couple.

Song of the Day

Over the weekend my friend Avery stayed with me and we listened to this cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps probably 8 times. Obviously it’s an incredible song so the only thing that could make it better is if 4 of the greatest musicians of all time teamed up to cover it. I highly recommend you watch the performance on YouTube just so you can see Prince’s guitar solo.

Listen to the full Jabroni Capital playlist here.

Newsletter Feedback

I’d love your feedback on what sort of content you’d like to see or how you think I could improve :)

That’s all for this week folks,

Jack Kuveke (J.K.) | GP @ Jabroni Capital