Venture capitalists will insist that they don’t engage in “pattern matching” and are not just looking for people who look like Mark Zuckerberg. But they are, and this makes perfect sense, because that’s what mom-and-pop investors want to buy. Investors in the public markets want to get in on the ground floor of the next Facebook. So that’s what venture capitalists in Silicon Valley try to make for them, selecting “college dropouts with insane ideas going after tiny markets with no idea how to monetize,” as venture capitalist Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz once put it.
