[kragen]

Instead of having VCs who don’t respect hackers and work hard to rip them off on behalf of their LPs, you’d have VCs who don’t respect hackers and also don’t understand technology, which sounds like a great way for their LPs to lose all their money.

I wanted to say “this is how pets.com got funded” but actually it turns out pets.com was started by the CEO who led Berkeley Systems, the flying toaster people, into an acquisition where she got laid off; and she was funded by Hummer Winblad and Amazon. And so while Julie Wainwright may not have exactly been Brin and Page getting funded by Andy Bechtolsheim, she certainly had experience managing technology companies, and her VCs certainly knew what they were getting into. And other ridiculous stories from the same time, like FireDrop/Zaplet (business plan: send DHTML by email) had similarly impeccable pedigrees (funded: US$90M by Kleiner, Joe Kraus, Bill Joy, Esther Dyson, et al.)

So, how much worse would it get, really? Hundreds of billions of dollars a year of investment capital desperately chasing any Ivy League graduate who knows how to tie a tie and promises to hire an army of monkey programmers just as soon as they get funded?