Meet Mike Rothenberg, The 28-Year-Old Whose Seed Fund Could Be The Best

techcrunch.com

18 points·leepnet··6 comments

Here's a nice little noise filtering rule for fellow HNers - in the spirit Betteridge's law of headlines;

If you ever see an article where a person's age precedes their achievements, then whatever they have achieved is not worth your time.

But it could be the best...

The headline reads like the author specifically avoided Betteridge's law. However, the TechChunch headline reads at the end, "Could Be The Best Bang For Your Cap Table Buck [emphasis mine--left out of the HN headline]". We have to be careful when talking about what is the "best" of anything, because we then have to define the metric.

> The 28-year-old Rothenberg explains that the goal of his one-man firm “is to open up my network to the founders and be available as a sounding board for them while taking a fraction of the cap table space that larger investors take. My network is often complementary to the other investors on the cap table, as they are often older than the founders while I typically invest in founders around my age.”

In this case, the metric seems to be VC-derived utility per dollar invested. Since utility is a nebulous concept, this metric is by definition also nebulous and inexact.

Sorry about the headline clip. I should have added an ellipses. HN limited the headline to 80 chars, so I started cutting off words until it fit. I hear you that the meaning sounds altered with the shorter headline.

I can understand your predicament. IMO, this story would be better served by a descriptive headline rather than paraphrasing TechCrunch.

I half expected to see that damn Gretzky quote. All that's missing is an informercial.

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