Charles River Ventures' Angel Experiment: First Nine Investments

I found that strange also. Hadn't heard of any of these companies. Obviously that doesn't mean they don't exist, but it's still strange to me.

Maybe you read more general startup-covering press than I do, but for my own part, I read NYT, programming.reddit, and news.yc. There's a lot of sampling bias there towards YC companies, because the NYT doesn't do that much startup at all, while the other two go crazy on YC. So I wouldn't be surprised that I and maybe you have heard of all the YC companies but none of the CRV ones.

As to the usefulness of the fund, it seems like a perfectly good second round of funding if you start at YC, or a first round if you don't get into YC. (maybe you can pay for PR with the extra bucks)