There are a lot of stupid rich people in this world, it's true. It's also somewhat of a dirty little secret that some of Silicon Valley's most successful VCs ar

There are a lot of stupid rich people in this world, it's true. It's also somewhat of a dirty little secret that some of Silicon Valley's most successful VCs are stupid rich people. The team at Andreesen Horowitz, however, are not among these stupid rich people. If anything, they have disrupted the standard operating procedure among their peers by outsmarting them, and the nature of how they have outsmarted their peers is strongly connected to an appetite for attaching high valuations to small groups of really smart people. Their organizational M.O. has been the exact opposite of bargain-bin talent hunting, which is why this whole Hacker Rank thing comes off so weird to me. I want to be clear that I don't think A16Z is up to anything evil. Just something sneaky (which is fun!). These are smart people, and for them to publicly engage with the hacker community in this manner is indicative of some sort of really smart hypothesis being tested.