For all those founders out there, just keep grinding and ignore self serving VC nonsense: good businesses are a heck of a lot rarer than people with money and if you've got one they'll swarm to you like rats to a sewer and then you can pick whichever one you like or none.
If you don't want to be disappointed by the wizard, don't look behind the curtain.
VCs want you to believe this narrative because it means you start from a much weaker negotiating position and it restricts deal flow to entrenched firms.
I would imagine something like that would happen if some other prestigious firm invested previously and it shows up on crunchbase
We do have a bit of previous so it's possible people know about us from things we've done before (though to be clear it's nothing super crazy). And while we don't spend much time with VCs, if we can possibly help it, we do spend a bunch of time with other founders, many of whom are VC funded.
The rest is just a candid description of how the world works.
There are way more people wanting VC funding that there is VC funding.
That makes VCs need a filter. Points 2-4 describe how filtering works in real world.
If you want to improve things (and there is much to improve), seeing things as they are is the best first step.