[system16]

The most surprising thing about this is how bumbling and incoherent SBF appears. Crooked or not I would expect anybody to be able to convince corporate level execs to invest millions would at least be able to sound like they know what they are talking about.

[xyst]

He didn’t “convince” them of anything. He used family connections and those initial investors didn’t do any DD. Other investors noticed those investors put in some money and did the same. Cryptocurrency was also a buzzword so it was an easy sell. It was less of a “con” and more of privilege. And taking advantage of greed.

Same thing happened with that one woman that ran “Theranos”. Just know the right people. Although I think she was a slightly better public speaker. The yoda voice shit was weird though.

[steveBK123]

It's disappointing seeing how many of these startup frauds are basically connections laundering at inception. Makes you wonder what % of successful startups are the same (far from 0).

[bragr]

Not really surprising. When he was on his apology tour before getting arrested, he basically fell apart like this anytime someone asked him good questions and forced him off script. He ended up running from public Twitter Spaces several times because of that. Well you can't bail from the witness stand.

[taude]

I'm continuously amazed that people called him a "charismatic" speaker, etc. Really amazes me that this is the bar for an exec, company leader these days.

[fuzzfactor]

>Crooked or not I would expect anybody to be able to convince corporate level execs to invest millions would at least be able to sound like they know what they are talking about.

One of the most effective sales techniques is to sell the customer's own dream right back to the customer.

To qualify the prospects you need a marketing strategy that builds a pipeline of potential customers likely to possess the type of dream that you can work with.

Here there was no persuasive salesmanship needed to convince "investors", someone else had already done that in advance, or the customers had built interest on their own.

Sam was just there to use their money, and if a certain amount of losses were inevitable that was supposed to be overcome by greater amounts of gains in the long run. Skimming just a little bit off the top to where it's obscured by the noise of the losses is what lots of financial outfits have done for centuries. The higher-integrity firms have decades of experience carefully disclosing their terms for this activity to their customers, which is one of the reasons why more persuasive sales efforts might be a lot more common.

As soon as Sam started skimming without proper disclosure, that's what made it ordinary theft.

[xorcist]

The best way to get millions invested is to have other investors go first. This is the guy who played video games during a venture pitch and rambling on about a future Everything App.

The business idea of venture capital is not to follow through with the investment all the way to a mature company with long term profits. It is to offload to later investors. It's hard to fault anyone as long as they go in with their eyes open.

[Tarq0n]

Though people are making valid points in the other comments, don't underestimate what stress and bad circumstances can do to one's cognition. This isn't necessarily how he was performing before.

[tennisflyi]

Same difference/bell-curve meme. You get punished for succinct answers.

[josho]

I think our recent 0 interest rate environment resulted in many companies receiving investments that were unlikely if capital markets weren't overflowing with cash.

[lamontcg]

The idea that we live in a meritocracy is a fraud.

[wnevets]

Just shows the power of crypto buzzwords had over an non-technical audience.