This guy was telling everyone he's an LP. Looked him up later. Math PhD student at Yale. That's the full resume. No fund, no investments, no operating experience. Just a guy doing academic research who flew down to India and apparently decided Indian founders needed his wisdom.
He spent a chunk of the evening drilling an ex-founder who had actually built and exited a real-money gaming company. Lecturing him on P&L, unit economics, all of it. Has probably never sat in a room where runway is running out and you're trying to figure out how to pay 20 people next month. But the accent and the volume worked like magic and the founder couldn't get a word in. The advice he was handing out to younger founders:
"You don't need an ICP, sell to everyone" "You don't need to raise funds" The P/E ratio is broken Real-money gaming is a bad business model
At a YC event. Telling founders they don't need to know their customers. Don't need to raise (which most YC companies literally did, that's the point of YC). Giving Dream11 and Winzo-tier founders a reality check on their model. Read the fucking room.
Then the part that really got me. A young founder in the group mentioned she's engaged. He immediately told her mixing personal and professional is "unstable," it's a "red flag to VCs," she should build alone. Then, very casually, offered to back her himself. Bro. Mind your own business. These are young founders. Some of them will actually listen to this stuff.
What gets me most is how fast we hand out credibility in India to anyone showing up with a foreign school attached. Not even an MBA. A math PhD. Has he built anything? Shipped anything? Made one business decision with real money on the line? Nope. But the pedigree works like a cheat code. Some of the sharpest operators on the planet are sitting right here. Zerodha, Zoho, Freshworks, Razorpay, Dream11, plus a thousand bootstrapped businesses nobody on Twitter talks about because they're not "scalable" enough for content. Not every great business is a VC business. Not every VC business was right to raise. You decide what you're building, not some guy who discovered India two weeks ago.
If you're a young founder reading this:
Ask people what they've actually built before you take their advice. Watch them fold. Being engaged or married is not a red flag, it's a life. If someone's credentials are 100% academic and they're lecturing you about business, they are performing, not advising.
Anyway, we need more people pushing back in the moment at these events instead of nodding along. If you want to brag about being an investor, put it on your Hinge profile. Not at a founder event where people actually listen to you.
These guys aren't HNIs. They're not VCs. They paid $100 for a VIP badge and spent the night calling themselves investors. Stop engaging.
orionblastar•1h ago
I learned never to discriminate or judge others; you never know their story. If someone is married or engaged, it is their own personal business that doesn't make them a bad employee or red flag. Truth is, I can work with almost anyone as long as they don't stab me in the back. I'm here to help and have a passion for the industry. I'm 57, have schizoaffective disorder, but those shouldn't be red flags or make me unstable. In fact, it is discrimination based on age and disability.
I learned to program when I was 12 on a Commodore 64 in BASIC. I went to college to learn how to program in other languages on multiple platforms. I went and earned a business management degree to go with my IS degree. I got skin in the game.
I've been to Thailand 3 times already, and it has religion and culture from India, and they have Indian people living there as well, whom I met. I learned International Business and Global Management in college.
I'm in a slump, and have to start all over again as AI becomes popular and all of the retro tech I know isn't being used anymore.
I've run two businesses with friends, I know how hard it is to turn a profit and pay everyone, and the bills pile up as well.
Fake Programmers who don't know how to code are doing the fake it until you make it, and need a teacher or mentor like me on the job to help them learn what they need to know.
If I had enough money and time, I would be doing business and legal apps cross-platform for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
danish00111•43m ago
One thing I didn't mention in the post. The girl he was flirting with? I actually know her and her guy. She's the one who asked me to come meet this LP. Sitting there watching him flirt with her, tell her she should build alone and he'd back her, her passing him gum, him half on his phone — wasn't a great watch. She showed me his LinkedIn. Yale PhD in math, no funding mentioned, no background in entrepreneurship. Just wanting to flirt with her. I left.
He couldn't say anything to me directly. All the peacocking was for her and for the young game dev founder he was grilling. Then he turned to that founder and told him he doesn't need to raise funds, trying to pull him down just to look smart, and I lost it internally.
I've been in gaming 10 years. First 2 bootstrapped, building games for other companies. Got funding in year 4, through an accelerator, because the total annual VC money in India right now is roughly what Anthropic raised in the previous round.
So when he turned and told the guy "you don't need VC money, you're not ready," I jumped in to defend him.
At some point she told me he'd said something about my product too — that I don't need an ICP, that I shouldn't focus on one user. Our traction came from neurodivergent kids who loved the product. We teach real-life skills through games — originally aimed at young adults, but neurodivergent kids especially get a lot from it, because reading social cues, setting boundaries, body language, negotiation, all of that is harder for them, and games are a low-stakes way to practice. Meanwhile he was acting like some YC advisor or LP, showing off and telling everyone what to do.
I don't know why I'm this upset. Maybe my ego, maybe I just really wanted to shut him up in the moment and didn't. Just hated everything about him, his energy, all of it.
Thanks for listening, orionblastar. Made a real difference. :)