1. Founders/Product fit 2. Product/Market fit 3. Social Proof 4. Team 5. Progress and frequency of activity 6. Dedication 7. Grit/Character 8. Past successes/failures (overall experience)
1: Mark Zuckerberg wasn't a particularly social guy, so his founders/product fit was 0.
2. product/market fit: Facebook was a social network just for schools, this doesn't really show any product/market fit. it's a super niche product with no obvious revenue model.
3. founder had zero social proof. couldn't even bag any advertising clients.
4. founder didn't get along great with team, in fact all team members sued him.
5. the very first verison of the site looked and features it had in 2004 - https://www.quora.com/What-did-the-first-version-of-Facebook... does not show that much progress or activity.
6. Mark was just a Harvard student, so were the other team members, no dedicated staff at all.
7. No basis to judge.
8. No prior past experience to judge from.
Based on the above there is a 0.00% chance that you would fund Facebook at the seed stage, at any valuation. Out of 8 standards, you would have to give them a 0/8 on nearly all of them.
but hey, the fact that your investment thesis fails with perfect hindsight, doesn't mean it can't succeed when things are a lot more murky. go get 'em.
Yet these two are the definition of outliers in terms of value created by a long shot.
you get the idea.
I am saying that lowglow is like an NBA basketball coach who will only draft white men under 5 feet tall and over 30, on the theory that they'll try harder since they have something to prove. well, good for him.
it's true that Michael Jordan is an outlier at 6 ft 6 in. But if you're only going to draft white men over thirty and under 5 feet tall, your team is going to suck.
The investment thesis needs revision.
Also, Zuck did have a crazy grind work ehtic which would have gotten him most likely 1 point. And he did have a good history of projects he had built before and shown competence, maybe not multi-million dollar ventures but a lot of good chops.
I don't know if the given strategy would work, but saying it would not have bought FB isn't really useful in any way.
After all, to be a successful investor you don't need to invest in every successful company; you only need your portfolio as a whole to be successful.
Coming out of that era with that cred would put him higher than most at his age.
(More specifically, he wouldn't have given them the time of day or even so much as returned an email, a 0/10 across 8 categories means that it's not worth so much as a reply.)
EDIT: I didn't realize you're lowglow. My point stands. You need better investment criteria :)