
Repeat After Me: Investors Are Never the Story - bjonathan
http://gigaom.com/2010/11/09/repeat-after-me-investors-are-never-the-story/
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j_baker
I suppose investors are brand names when you get down to it. Ever notice how
movie previews always begin with "from the producer/writer/director of
<popular movie x>"? Same thing here.

I'm curious why serial entrepreneurs don't get the same credit though. Perhaps
investors just invest in more companies than serial entrepreneurs start.

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fliph
The importance of the <popular movie person> mentioned in the movie preview is
directly proportional to how good the movie is going to be. e.g., "From the
director of Avatar..." is probably going to be a good movie. "From the sound
editor of Forrest Gump" doesn't have quite the same chances.

I can't recall what movie it was, but I once saw a trailer that touted itself
as "from the company that distributed <not very good movie>." The movie proved
to be terrible.

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johnrob
Hacker News is reasonably guilty of this. How many headlines have we seen with
something like (YC W10) in it?

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tjarratt
I figure this is more like a secret handshake. Presumably anyone reading news
at news.ycombinator.com will have an inherent interest in companies that YC
invests in.

Not that (YC W10) is a very subtle signal, but it's signaling _something_ to
the audience.

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DevX101
Investor names are usually mentioned to establish social proof, but I find
that it's rarely the case that the article itself focuses on the investor not
the company.

For his example RockMelt, I just picked 4 random stories from Google News --
most of them mentioned Marc Andreesen but he wasn't the focus of the article.

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jcampbell1
Is there an endorsement stronger than real money?

