[karma_vaccum123]

So what. 95% of the poseurs doing "angel" investing are in it for the scene, the cachet, the parties, the "networking", the name-dropping etc etc. Rothenberg gave people what they wanted....a very exclusive club with ridiculous membership fees and all of the very visible attributes that let the "LPs" signal to their peers that they were "Valley players".

[totalcrepe]

That sounds like the descriptions of the IPO purchasers (being the cash out providers for insiders) just before the last dotcom crash. They didn't know what it was but they wanted to be invested in tech.. anything they couldn't understand was going to have an absurd ROI, putting them in the rich crowd.

Like the nature of the dot com crash, if it ends like a pyramid scheme, that reflects worse on the state of finance and analysis of our industry than on the last "suckers" in another tulip season.