The filter for relevance for investment that has overwhelmingly survived in the market is social proof ("warm intros") for a reason: it's substantially more exp

The filter for relevance for investment that has overwhelmingly survived in the market is social proof ("warm intros") for a reason: it's substantially more expensive and harder to fake third party signals (including their own quality) than your own. Why did Google beat all the search directories? The latter used keywords on pages to figure out relevance, which was easily gamed by sites putting up thousands of keywords. Google weighed (still weighs) both the number of links and the quality of each referrer. The SEO vs search relevance war continues to this day, but PageRank gives Google a long term advantage. The attractiveness of an investment has many variables with the two most important team quality and traction. Many VCs are on record saying they'll fund a pre-product company if the team is worth it. If a number of high quality referrers are recommending the team, then the team quality variable might override the others. The hype's substance here was the referrer quality.