> Before Y Combinator, character had not traditionally been an important factor for investors.
Really, before 2005 social factors had nothing to do with people giving each other money?...Really?
Comical generalizations and an absurdly ironic level of grandiosity on display here.
Yes.
I was a developer for companies that raised money in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I can absolutely assure you that the decision to invest was driven by slidedecks and financial models far more than personalities and the social abilities of founders. If you could write a good business plan with all the right keywords you could raise an early round even if you were a total sociopath with no clue what you were doing.
That's not to suggest there was anything actually wrong with that. People hadn't invested in SaaS businesses before because they didn't exist. No one really knew what was necessary for success. The personality of the founder or their ability to sell wasn't considered important. People thought that "Build it, they will come" was a viable route to market. The shift to investing in companies that have a good culture driven by interesting, exciting founders is something that investors learned relatively slowly.