For those of you who don’t know, WATB stands for Whiny Ass Titty-Baby, and in this case it is referring to the delicate snow flakes in Silicon Valley who will brook no criticism of the dumbest and most ill informed business plans:

The first rule of Silicon Valley venture capital is never insult a start-up. Founders are always killing it, disrupting the world or just plain 🙌🙌🙌.

If a start-up is fizzling, shuttering or caught scamming? The socially acceptable response is total silence.

Everyone knows that. Except Jason Palmer.

The start-up in question was AltSchool, a Mark Zuckerberg-backed project to turn school into a start-up experience. It had just announced it was pivoting out of existence after raising $174 million.

$174M lessons here. We passed on @Altschool multiple times, mainly because disrupting school was a terrible strategy, but also b/c founders didn’t understand #edtech is all about partnering w/existing districts, schools and educators (not just “product”) https://t.co/nPCjV83Zi4

— Jason Palmer (@educationpalmer) June 29, 2019

That single jab at a failed company sent the investor elite into conniptions.

……

Mr. Palmer believed he would save his investors money by not investing in a start-up that would have lost it. He was right. But in the cacophony of venture capitalist boosting, that became about emotion, and even soul.

……

By not knowing the rules, he showed exactly what those rules are, and just how the Silicon Valley positivity machine runs. For venture capitalists, Twitter is a place to sell. It’s a place to talk up portfolio companies. It’s a place to perform the industry pastime of “thought leading.”

What this sh%$ storm sounds like is what happens when someone running a Ponzi scheme gets challenged.

The idea that the white dudes, and they are very white, and very dude as a rule, must be handled with kid gloves because they are saving (or disrupting) the universe, when most of them are just working on brave new ways to break the law, or suck the marrow out of the public commons, is complete crap.

I long for the day when an aggressive anti-fraud investigation targets the Silicon Valley.