First Round Capital funds some of the best companies in tech. But this horrific video makes me lose all respect for all of them. Everyone in it ought to be ashamed and embarrassed.
Attention old dude venture capitalists on Viagra! Please do not rap. Even parody rap. Yeah, we all know the video, we’ve all seen the damn thing. It’s just awful. But yours is, impossibly, worse. It’s not even so bad it’s good. It’s just so much worse that you look clueless. All of you.
And I even like a lot of these companies. Or at least, I did. An off-the-record source tells me that it’s “expected” for companies to participate in these First Round videos, if not explicitly required. Which I guess puts most of the onus on First Round, for being not just tone deaf and stupid but also pushy and gross. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me never want to take VC money, at least not from these guys. I mean, are these cats really so clueless that they don’t realise how bad it makes their companies look?
That sound you hear? It’s me smashing my Warby Parker glasses underfoot. The long silence that followed was me deleting my turntable.fm account. I mean, I do not want to follow that, Path! (And I was just starting to like you again.) And come on, TaskRabbit. You’re already using a condescending name for your workers, and now you’re making actual employees be in this video? And speaking of employees, Jelli, I’ve never heard of you, but I hope you hire that poor guy interviewing for a job who you made be in the video. GroupMe? You don’t even want to know what we’re saying about you on the Gizmodo group right now. (Hint: It’s really funny.) And Get Satisfaction? Seriously? I won’t be satisfied until you publicly apologise for lending your, um, talents to this atrocity.
I’m just exhausted now. Exhausted and sad for the world.