People seeking knowledge, experience, and advice outbidding each other to sit down with people with knowledge, experience, and advice. For charity. Doesn't seem so backwards to me.
Start-up knowledge, experience and advice comes from entrepreneurs, not VCs. Read their bios, they are financial and marketing professionals. Nothing wrong with that, but they are not the kind of people who started companies from nothing and now are VCs (like PG for example).
It should be the other way around: They should be buying lunches for entrepreneurs. Scouting deals is their job after all.
Since the possible set of bidders includes non-starving non-entrepreneurs and everything in between, the vector relationship is direction-less and thus incapable of being 'backwards'.
That being said, this has been a staple of charity 'silent auctions' for a while. I and 79 of my closest friends had lunch with Dean Martin in Las Vegas one year as part of a MD telethon related charity event. That was like 1977 I think.
From the point of view of encouraging entreprenurial growth it is probably counter productive, you've got a lunch, with some guys who understand running a small business, but are you really going to be able to develop enough shared context to make any improvement over your current plan? I think it is unlikely and a trip to the library to read some of the things they have published (or accounts of how they did what they did) would give you a stronger benefit as the thoughts on paper are concise and on target, and not competing with 4 other people for attention.
Now if you're a founder doing a funding round and you think your pitch is going to take more than 30 seconds and you've been trying for weeks to get them to just take the damn meeting so you could pitch them, well this could be one way to work that.
Personally, I prefer a system where merit determines who gets the lunch with the VIP. That's why we built http://letslunch.com
Just last Friday, two entrepreneurs had lunch with Drew Houston and Trip Adler. Because they paid the most? No. Because they got rated highly by their peers.