Glad to see Tom's blog on HN - as usual a great write up. A number of us have been chatting about this for several months now, and the take is fairly sober.
Meta commentary but I've grown weary of how commentary by actual domain experts in our industry are underrepresented and underdiscussed on HN in favor of emotionally charged takes.
Calling a VC a "domain expert" is like calling an alcoholic a "libation engineer." VC blogs are, in the best case, mildly informative, and in the worst, borderline fraudulent (the Sequoia SBF piece being a recent example, but there are hundreds).
The incentives are, even in a true "domain expert" case (think: doctors, engineers, economists), often opaque. But when it comes to VCs, this gets ratcheted up by an order of magnitude.
Tom has had a fairly solid track record at Redpoint and now Theory in Data, Enterprise SaaS, and AI/ML. And it's not like we see many posts by engineers, doctors, or economists on HN either - most posts are listicles about the "culture" of technology, an increased amount of political articles growing increasingly tenuously related to the tech industry, and a portion of actually interesting technical content.
Martin Casado is a counter-example. His writings on technology starting with his phd thesis are very informative. [0] Heβs the real thing as are many others.
Meta commentary but I've grown weary of how commentary by actual domain experts in our industry are underrepresented and underdiscussed on HN in favor of emotionally charged takes.