Ah! I think a better way to describe VCs focus on teams is this: "A great team is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for us to be willing to invest."

Ah! I think a better way to describe VCs focus on teams is this: "A great team is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for us to be willing to invest." The thing the OP is saying that the team is usually the first/most obvious problem with the startup. It takes about 10 minutes to get a sense that a team sucks (bad salespeople, abrasive, confused, misguided, insane-- whatever), while due diligence on a product/market can be a pretty big task. Most investors judge the whole package (market, timing, traction, product, team). Whether general feeling of team quality is a measure of anything useful is an interesting question. Most of these guys have pretty endless deal flow. Like a company that has way too many applicants for way too few job openings, they look for early ways to thin the herd.