It's not that exactly. It's that investors are more interested in making money than "ideas". And they feel that people who have a good track record of deliverin

It's not that exactly. It's that investors are more interested in making money than "ideas". And they feel that people who have a good track record of delivering results are more likely to make them money than unknown an team with a great idea. This is post-hoc justification. Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter have been worth billions (Reddit the exception) for more than a decade. They've collectively innovated how much since 2005? They have a bunch of small improvements that anyone could have anticipated and purchased many of the good ideas that have come along (Occulus). Some are floundering in spite of having massive reach (Twitter), some can't anticipate uses of their platform until after it happens (Facebook). Some are dead and their founders have joined the VC game (Digg). Did Kevin Rose not look like a pretty sure bet in 2006? Whatever happened to Milk? Yet according to the "they know how to deliver" logic, they should be knocking new ideas out of the park. Where are they? Of course they have some successes but you could have some successes too if you have billions of dollars to subsidize yourself and an existing social network to support yourself and advertise your success. You throw ideas at a wall and the ones that work are evidence of know how. It's a broken metric. Honestly, there is no evidence these companies are well run except for the fact that they won, but they effectively won a lottery at which point money starts flowing in. And that's the entire VC game - you'll have some moderate successes, mostly failures, and some unicorns. As long as you hit jackpot a few times you are ok. Meanwhile, part of the VC job is selling the idea that they know what they are doing, too. And with hundreds of thousands of the world's smartest kids being funneled through the top colleges each year, you've got a lot of lottery tickets. I think it's interesting that all of these authors are at Stanford or MIT. Seems similar to the backgrounds of a lot of tech talent: Gates (Harvard), Zuckerberg (Harvard), Brin and Page (Stanford), Reddit guys (Cambridge area) you could go on and on. Maybe there would be more diversity of ideas if the people behind them weren't all coming from similar backgrounds and self-selecting to certain locales...