VCs get their funds from different sources so, they are incentivized to fund those areas where they can get the maximum ROI. This means that the focus is on the business means customer growth, revenue, etc.
Y Combinator, whom I admire a lot has a great brick & fire analogy for the product & customer needs.
1. This means that only those products get funded which can be understood easily by investors.
2. It should be an easy sell to a potential customer. This means by definition, it would be an easy-to-understand solution that most people can understand in a cold email = shallow product, for instant gratification of immediate need.
3. If the investor did not get #1, then they are able to infer the value from #2 (customer growth).
This seems to be a very old way of determining the value of anything because tech is only growing in complexity on all fronts. Those most disruptive things would fail on all three fronts by definition.
This is why in story after story, we see the biggest companies of today failed to get funding. They eventually got it by blind faith based on social networking, based on where they went to school. But, the socially networked techies live in their own echo chambers because of the existence of all these social networks.
