If you swap the context of investing in start-ups to the extreme of praying to the correct Gods to get rainfall, you'll be hard pressed to find any differences.

If you swap the context of investing in start-ups to the extreme of praying to the correct Gods to get rainfall, you'll be hard pressed to find any differences. From personal experience, if you pray on Tuesday evening and if it's a colder than usual morning on Wednesday, you pray on Thursday, I've found that it appeases the rain Gods. This is comparable to 'founders need to have X quality and Y quality, and respond to emails quickly'. It's silly. Except it's not silly if what these guys are doing is taking other people's money to invest. Then it all begins to make sense - in the past the priests talked to Gods via special powers. Today, nerds speak to the God of intellect and science. They need to put out predictions and rationalizations to reinforce faith in their ability to talk to the God of intellect and science. It's the same mechanism, the Gods have changed. We're playing a confidence and faith game over and over again. The entire scientific grant system is based on priesthood, which is why anytime somebody actually makes a scientific breakthrough, the existing priest caste tries their best to ridicule and ex-communicate them while another set of priest-potentials fights to take credit for the discovery and establish themselves as new priests. Real science gets in the way of the priesthood system by undermining the credibility of existing priests. Hence my bold prediction - within the next 10 years, there'll be a billion dollar start-up with founders who don't quickly reply to emails and whatever other voodoo Sam believes he possesses to tell success from failure apart - it's all hubris, besides the trivialities of 'willing to work hard, intelligent, goal oriented'.