"Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM"

--> GP's point was: You need to look good while losing all your LP's money.

The charitable interpretation, especially for early stage investors, is that your investment will not be the last one necessary to realize a successful outcome.

If a company is having a hard time finding investors now, in the future when it needs more money it may fail for lack of takers, spiking current investments.

> Is there any hard evidence that founders who secure funding earlier are more likely to provide a VC with a successful exit?

There really isn't much hard evidence about any correlative patterns about early stage VCs. Which is why their model is essentially spray and pray. The successful ones (Sequoias, a1z, etc.) are just signaling rods whereby high growth startups gravitate towards well known VCs, which in turns means signaling to M&A markets.

This is the smart comment. If, as a VC, you know the outliers are hard to find, would you really get distracted by someone being on the market for 1-2 months?

>Is this really a sensible factor to consider?

Sensible or cognitive bias that is in play regardless if it is sensible? I've seen a little research on jobs that discriminate against people not currently employed, with longer periods of unemployment leading to greater discrimination. I haven't seen anything about if this is actually justified or not.

I've also heard of this in other areas, like with date, but I haven't been able to find any research and the topic borders some controversial areas that research has struggle handling.

My guess is that it does happen as a bias, related to peer pressure and following a crowd, but like with other biases, even if it makes sense in some cases historically it will lead to illogical behavior in our current society.