[magic_hamster]

The question then is, how do select the people. In VCs, like you said, you'd look for a great team. What does that mean? It means mostly one thing: track record. This is what I meant by status. It's not your title. In academia, very similarly to tech, some people are rising stars, and they can get funding for anything they like. I'm just saying, consider the project and not just the person.

[frodetb]

I don't think that's accurate. One of the things that make incubation and choosing which startups to fund so difficult is precisely the lack of track record. According to Graham himself, when everyone involved with a startup are new to the scenes they're invading, you instead end up relying on such nebulous concepts as "imagination", "naughtyness"[1], or "earnestness"[2].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/earnest.html