That's not a statement of pedigree.
"operational capabilities" basically means that investors have some way to figure out that the founders can organize labor, manage money, define the product, find customers, ect.
How is such a judgement made, though?
That's exactly what the parent was saying, investors can only draw that conclusion based on pedigree and experience. "Oh they ran the software at the warehouses in Amazon, they must be experts in that, here's $5M for your warehouse management software". Unfortunately this often gets conflated with pattern matching that doesn't always correlate with a person's pedigree and their ability to "organize labor, manage money, define the product, find customers, ect.". In other words, you're both saying the same thing.
Investors telling the public that they can appropriately assess startup teams in a 1-hour pitch is a glittering lure to increase deal flow, not something that makes one investor necessarily smarter than an other.
That's only 1/3rd; the other 1/3rd is "Successfully founded xyzCorp that had $xxxx / year revenue and sold for $x,xxx,xxx after 5 years."
Investing in a founding team where the founders have a solid history of starting successful companies isn't relying on pedigree.
The final 1/3rd is looking at the team dynamic during a pitch. Is the team on the same page? Are they happy with each other? Does one person do all the talking?
If that's what they were doing then there would be a lot of talk about how those who have never founded a company can never get funding.
You don't really know because you don't know if I was a warehouse employee hired for a holiday season or if I was instrumental in something in the early days.
Obviously investors are funding people without prior exits where they were founders, otherwise there would be a chicken and egg problem.
I would like to see stats as to the number of "successful exits" the average founding team that raises an A round has.
But clearly I should emphasize the exits on the pedigree slide of our pitch deck.