John Backus
@jcbackus
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John Backus is a venture capital investor at the PROOF Fund - a big, new idea in Venture Capital.
Virginia, USA
Joined March 2009
I love this idea. It channels my inner Milton Friedman. Let the free markets rule! Along a similar vein can we also auction to the highest bidder the spectrum currently given to legacy broadcast tv media?
Send all of em back. Auction off citizenship/Visas to highest bidder. Google can bring in engineers. Charitable donors can bring in asylum seekers. Government can't buy any. Cap number to be sold at say 750,000 per year. If you sponsor an immigrant and pay for their Visa/citizenship, you are also financially responsible for any liabilities, damages, govt subsidies incurred by this new resident for say 10 years. Immigration becomes a profit center, sponsors are invested and liable, gang members and criminals will not be let in. True asylum seekers can be let in by charitable folks. Market for VISAs insures the most worthy or productive get in. Thoughts?
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Scott, I think you need to work for the new DOGE - Department of Government Efficiency. I’ll join you!
De-scope the feds, send 80% of the scope and workers to the states. Cut the fed tax rate so the states can tax locally for what they need in their state. Dissolve most cabinet portions and eliminate the department. Start with the fbi
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Are you getting eclipse fever? Love live music? Still not sure where to go? Check out @atlasobscura and their Ecliptic Festival. Tickets, flights and hotels are still available!
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I love this @PROOFVC company. Some amazing things in the pipeline here. Stay tuned!
Excited to officially welcome @bonesandbugs as Chief Science Officer of @itiscolossal ! Welcome Beth! Read more here:
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Powerful. Brave. Speaking truth to power. Time for a new movement. Time to "defund the schools" of indoctrination. It starts with donors. Just say no. @ShaiDavidai
To the presidents of @Columbia, @nyuniversity, @Harvard and other universities who have stood SILENT as terror supporters have marched through campus and celebrated raping women, executing children and kidnapping grandmothers, you are cowards. Listen to Columbia Professor and father @ShaiDavidai’s heartbreaking speech:
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Look who was on my plane today from DC to San Francisco. Escorted by 5 armed security people to a waiting 2-car caravan. Who is paying for this? I thought Fauci was “retired?” Enjoy @JebraFaushay
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Love @atlasobscura - it is one of the coolest companies out there. Sort of like a mix between National Geographic and Ripley's Believe it or Not. And, unlike other media companies, it is profitable! Happy to be an early investor.
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Lots of work went in to this from a team of great people. Happy to be a part of @flyvolato’s future!
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Well said. Does our government really want to play Russian Roulette with 15,000+ venture backed companies (most in california) and likely 250,000+ employees? And at the same time create a run on every other small bank? What a disastrous policy.
The gov’t has about 48 hours to fix a-soon-to-be-irreversible mistake. By allowing @SVB_Financial to fail without protecting all depositors, the world has woken up to what an uninsured deposit is — an unsecured illiquid claim on a failed bank. Absent @jpmorgan @citi or @BankofAmerica acquiring SVB before the open on Monday, a prospect I believe to be unlikely, or the gov’t guaranteeing all of SVB’s deposits, the giant sucking sound you will hear will be the withdrawal of substantially all uninsured deposits from all but the ‘systemically important banks’ (SIBs). These funds will be transferred to the SIBs, US Treasury (UST) money market funds and short-term UST. There is already pressure to transfer cash to short-term UST and UST money market accounts due to the substantially higher yields available on risk-free UST vs. bank deposits. These withdrawals will drain liquidity from community, regional and other banks and begin the destruction of these important institutions. The increased demand for short-term UST will drive short rates lower complicating the @federalreserve’s efforts to raise rates to slow the economy. Already thousands of the fastest growing, most innovative venture-backed companies in the U.S. will begin to fail to make payroll next week. Had the gov’t stepped in on Friday to guarantee SVB’s deposits (in exchange for penny warrants which would have wiped out the substantial majority of its equity value) this could have been avoided and SVB’s 40-year franchise value could have been preserved and transferred to a new owner in exchange for an equity injection. We would have been open to participating. This approach would have minimized the risk of any gov’t losses, and created the potential for substantial profits from the rescue. Instead, I think it is now unlikely any buyer will emerge to acquire the failed bank. The gov’t’s approach has guaranteed that more risk will be concentrated in the SIBs at the expense of other banks, which itself creates more systemic risk. For those who make the case that depositors be damned as it would create moral hazard to save them, consider the feasibility of a world where each depositor must do their own credit assessment of the bank they choose to bank with. I am a pretty sophisticated financial analyst and I find most banks to be a black box despite the 1,000s of pages of @SECGov filings available on each bank. SVB’s senior management made a basic mistake. They invested short-term deposits in longer-term, fixed-rate assets. Thereafter short-term rates went up and a bank run ensued. Senior management screwed up and they should lose their jobs. The @FDICgov and OCC also screwed up. It is their job to monitor our banking system for risk and SVB should have been high on their watch list with more than $200B of assets and $170B of deposits from business borrowers in effectively the same industry. The FDIC’s and OCC’s failure to do their jobs should not be allowed to cause the destruction of 1,000s of our nation’s highest potential and highest growth businesses (and the resulting losses of 10s of 1,000s of jobs for some of our most talented younger generation) while also permanently impairing our community and regional banks’ access to low-cost deposits. This administration is particularly opposed to concentrations of power. Ironically, its approach to SVB’s failure guarantees duopolistic banking risk concentration in a handful of SIBs. My back-of-the envelope review of SVB’s balance sheet suggests that even in a liquidation, depositors should eventually get back about 98% of their deposits, but eventually is too long when you have payroll to meet next week. So even without assigning any franchise value to SVB, the cost of a gov’t guarantee of SVB deposits would be minimal. On the other hand, the unintended consequences of the gov’t’s failure to guarantee SVB deposits are vast and profound and need to be considered and addressed before Monday. Otherwise, watch out below.
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RT @atlasobscura: We’re so excited to share that Atlas Obscura has been named one of @FastCompany’s Most Innovative Companies in Travel for…
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Do better @IdemiaGroup @Idemia_NA - 15 people at IAD with long-scheduled appointments have been waiting 45 minutes to be processed and nothing has happened. “Technology problems” is all we hear. Aren’t you a technology company?
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Now please tell us how to block ads on The Washington Post!
If you do only one thing, lock down ad settings. Twitter is free because it makes its money on advertising and access to data about its hundreds of millions of users. There are a few quick settings you can change to limit some of this activity.
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