> They're looking for secret sauce, barriers, friction. Something patentable. While that may be true, I'd suggest the VC's are just looking for a later exit wh

> They're looking for secret sauce, barriers, friction. Something patentable. While that may be true, I'd suggest the VC's are just looking for a later exit when a greater fool buys them out. They're betting on the ML investment market getting hotter, and providing you meet the criteria of being a growing startup (by some metric) nominally in the ML field and that field attracts more investment dollars later - even whether or not you succeed as a bottom line business, or whether your business success comes from ML or not - doesn't necessarily matter.