If you're filtering 2,000 qualified pitches per year down to 20-40 investments in the hope that 2-3 of those investments put you in the black - then your filter

If you're filtering 2,000 qualified pitches per year down to 20-40 investments in the hope that 2-3 of those investments put you in the black - then your filtering-signal-from-noise strategy clearly isn't working. You're throwing darts at a dartboard and assuming that your dartboard is better than everyone else's just because it's got more Stanford grads on it. But why, particularly, is it arrogant? Because the logic that startup founders need to demonstrate the ability to network with customers by first networking with VCs is horribly flawed. Perhaps that skillset of networking and selling to customers is exactly what's missing from a startup which otherwise has built a highly valuable product at low-cost - and isn't this precisely what you would expect from the stereotypical basement-dwelling übernerd, a product with high potential trapped by the poor social skills of its creator? Perhaps that ability to network is precisely how a VC can help a startup turn into a unicorn? No wonder nobody's managed to fix the interviewing process for software engineers. If you only interview engineers who you're personally introduced to, and then filter out anybody who isn't an alpha MIT grad, I mean, does it really surprise anybody anymore that this is a failed strategy? But if VCs filter out companies in this manner then why is it any wonder that companies filter out engineers in this manner?