Treating Google as a VC is in fact what I'm doing right now. PG and YCombinator and all of the associated acquired Google companies have significant mindshare

Treating Google as a VC is in fact what I'm doing right now. PG and YCombinator and all of the associated acquired Google companies have significant mindshare in the startup world right now. Most of these people are pretty fine with working with Google as a proxy VC. And as Google gets more and more of these it will become less and less of an issue, in the public mind, to treat a product failure as a google failure. And while they may have dropped the ball a few times, they are one of the best acquiring companies by far, and ona scale of VCs they are probably among the best.