[michaelochurch]

The takeaway from this is that VC-istan has turned into a celebrity economy.

The most relevant trait of a celebrity economy is the importance of visibility (and the vicious politics surrounding who gets to be visible). If everyone (most relevantly, the investor community) knows you're a 5.5, that's better than being a 10 that no one has ever heard of.

This has been my observation. I've met plenty of very successful founders (people that the HN crowd would have heard of) who are just not very impressive.

It also gets under my skin when VCs say, "we don't invest in ideas, we invest in people". To which I say, "then most of you should be fired, because you suck at that." Honestly, VCs are a lot better at picking ideas. Sure, a lot of these "social" apps are lame, but VCs actually do an excellent job of choosing what ideas to fund, given the constraints they face and their objective function (variance-agnostic expectancy maximization, 1-10 year payoffs). That they do well. On the other hand, they seem to be doing a lousy job of picking people (and at that, I would do a better job than 90+ percent of them).