To scale up and make 1000x profit.
Nobody cares about your brilliant idea or even nice looking prototype until you have proven you can make money with it.
Just too risky for investors in current economy.
And education, team etc while may look irrelevant are actually more correlated with future success than details of startup idea etc.
1) but was it any different in stable times? 2) I’ve looked at projects that got funding — almost any AI project with a dumb idea raises millions, but that’s not risk — that’s a safe and stable project. 3) for real investors, the emergence of a huge number of new technologies multiplied by global economic shifts is a great opportunity — new markets appear and old ones are being redistributed. It doesn’t get any better than this.
Investing in a bunch of smart ambitious dudes is already an extremely risky endeavor.
But its a spectrum, not black and white.
When money is cheap (aka “good” times) more investors are ready for more risky investments. When money is expensive - less.