I absolutely agree with you. It was an interesting experience because before you get in the room with these investors, investors that you've seen giving speech

I absolutely agree with you. It was an interesting experience because before you get in the room with these investors, investors that you've seen giving speeches and writing articles, you assume they are somehow these visionary people. Of course they'll ask all the right questions and understand things better than you do. But after the experience it was quite the realization that most of them had no idea what they were talking about (at least about our space). And if your vision of the world is different than theirs, there isn't that much you can do. Frankly we naively tried to appease them (for example we actually build a "Cherry"-like version of Thumbtack in a weekend to appease the NEA guy), but it doesn't work and they all reject you for so many different random reasons you couldn't even appease them all if you wanted to. You just really need to do your thing and hope you are right. They won't ignore traction though. Get enough traction and any VC will come around. To the point of the article, I think we were bad at pitching. We didn't have much traction when we raised the Series A but we had the obvious kernels of it. But we talked way too much about what we had done (which we thought was impressive), but VCs really want to hear much more about what you are going to do. And even when we did talk about the vision, it wasn't (and still isn't) anywhere near as sexy as Uber. Now while Thumbtack was a success for the founders, early investors, and early employees, it still has a tiny tiny fraction of the overall services market. While it is clear that companies that went out of business were "wrong", I'm not sure at what point Thumbtack's approach becomes "right".