"(1) It appears, really is quite clear, that they have high contempt for initial contacts from entrepreneurs via e-mail."
- First, what is your sample size? Do you have any idea how many meetings they give come through email? Just because they may have rejected you (no idea), doesn't mean they reject everyone. Second, I would suggest that a cold email is probably the worst way to approach ANY VC.
"A16Z wants to believe that they have 'deep domain knowledge' where they invest and, thus, wants to believe that anything new that A16Z has not heard of must be nonsense. If some supporting technical material is not easy reading for them, then they believe that they are justified in just regarding it as nonsense."
- I would disagree. That being said I think you're misunderstanding the point of the VC business. It is NOT to create / promote new technologies only. It is to promote businesses and segments that they believe will be profitable (in general).
"But, looking at the partners of A16Z, it's tough to find one with enough technical qualifications and/or accomplishments to (A) get a tenure track position in the engineering school of a leading research university, (B) be an editor of a leading technical journal of original research, (C) publish a peer-reviewed paper of original research in a technical field in a good or better journal of original research, or (D) get an NSF grant for original research."
- Ok. But again you're measuring the success of a VC on technical acumen. What are technologies generally used for? To solve problems. In business domains. You want to go through that partner list again and tell me they don't have experience in various business domains?
"Net, A16Z apparently is not competent to review or even to direct a competent review of technical material in information technology."
- They don't make a claim to. Next?
"What the A16Z financial performance really is is likely not easy to discover."
- Let's see. Google "a16z performance returns". First article: http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/23/nice-ira-andreesse... . I must be a genius. Yes, this is but the first data point; however, it's a start.....and based on other more recent data points (oculus, etc.), it may be suggested they're doing well. It's nice that you want to brush how most VCs are judged as successes or not (by the performance of their portfolio) as secondary in comparison to what you want to judge them by.
"You seem to suggest that the project for which the OP is some recruiting is for an internal information system to do causal modeling and make valuable predictions for venture investing."
- I'm sorry you inferred that. Allow me to be perfectly clear. I have no idea what they are recruiting for. I could imagine a lot of projects....the above is something that is certainly not out of bounds
"It would appear that they want to do cross tabulation and curve fitting; sorry, there is nearly no chance those techniques will work. Why? In simple terms, they are looking for new, exceptional cases, and looking at 'averages' from the past, even of successes in the past, is just intellectual self-abuse."
- It may appear like that to you; however, I would suggest it's probably much more complex. They could be performing (for example) some clustering techniques (k-means, k-medians, what not) across the investments. They could be performing a variety of analytics on the talent development portion to gain a better understanding of expectations of the companies and candidates. They could be doing a lot of things...
"If they are making money, then, fine."
- I'm pretty sure that's not the case with you. I'm pretty sure that even if it was shown they're beating even 80% of other VCs you would still be hyper critical of their technical evaluation skills.
"I've been around technical work in US national security, US business and start ups, including one of the most successful venture funded companies ever, and high end academic research, hold a Ph.D. in engineering from one of the world's best research universities, have published peer-reviewed original research in computer science, applied mathematics, and artificial intelligence"
- Do you want a cookie?
"and in comparison the technical qualifications of A16Z look like a bad joke."
- Yet their business and venture capital qualifications appear to be quite good.
"By an analogy, A16Z is looking for nurse practitioners instead of MD physicians. Both are necessary, but the nurse practitioners are not sufficient. There is a difference!"
- They're not looking for MD physicians as the portfolio companies have the technical expertise.