[wpietri]

When I say campaigns can be smaller, I mean that most VCs can't afford to do small deals. Their partners are too expensive. 10k projects are common on Kickstarter, though.

Your 50% number seems meaningless to me. Not everybody has to do the full research. Even with VC investments not everybody does full due diligence; as long as there's a lead investor willing to do the work many are much more casual. The larger a Kickstarter grows, the more likely it is to be scrutinized, both by funders and by outside participants. In this case, there was plenty of info available to evaluate the team.

Also, pointing out one failure like Diaspora is worse than meaningless. For every Kickstarter failure you find, I'm sure we can come up with 20 VC ones. Failure isn't the problem; failure is the point. Reward requires risk. Risk means some failures. As long as they continue to be, like Diaspora, interesting failures, then we're doing fine.