[gumby]

"Here's another hypothesis: It's the finance industry culture."

I have been on boards in the valley and in NYC, and I can see this very directly. The NY VCs were far more transactional, and more aggressively willing to drop a company and take the loss early.

Not that it's rainbows and unicorns in the valley! The VCs, after all, work for their customers (err, "LPs"). I've noticed that as the valley VCs are more and more frequently finance rather than former operating guys that they are more like this. I saw it in the dot-com boom, and guess which VCs got shellacked? Mostly the finance guys.