| > Ideally, you'd have both, but the talent pool is only so deep. I was going to disagree with this, but instead I'll combine it with some of the other comments here. I think you're right that the talent pool that they recognize is only so deep, and as some of the other commenters pointed out, the way talent is recognized is flawed. For example: > The problem is 'due diligence' on a startup's prospects cannot be reasonably made and so investors end up making gut decisions ... > ... chose any combination of name recognition, form fitting for preferred narrative of the day, social proof, in-group bias and proximity bias > Same as lots of incompetent people are in senior positions, it's a complicated social construction, it's not just a skills ranking. > 1. They're good salesman. > 2. They convinced people/VCs who are also "talentless". > It is about who you know, not what you know. As most of us know, there is a lot of talent out there, but it's not pattern-matching with what the investors are looking for. There are other problems too of course, but that's one of them. Another might be that the talent doesn't have access to sufficient capital or connections to build up a business to the point that it's worthy of investor attention. Speaking about myself, I still have reasonable confidence I'll end up in a good place, but it seems like it'll be a longer road than I had thought, and involve a path more like bootstrapping for 5-10 years. |