The most visible SV VCs don't do themselves any favors. Granting the "I can built a successful company" component, there are many who then claim to understand society, politics, philosophy, and everything in between. Then they loudly talk about their opinions. And then people see it, and think "wow, not super smart huh".
The cherry on the cake is how many of these VC people get mad about cancel culture, cuz it turns out that social media means they have way more people calling them stupid to their face (an experience they likely don't have in their day to day life, as the person with the money/firing capabilities). (To be fair I also don't have people calling me stupid to my face and it sounds unpleasant)
Of course there are many VCs who don't play this game, don't pretend to have seen behind the curtain of the universe, and people don't make fun of them on Twitter. And many of those people are plenty successful and fine.
But there are a couple who become the butt of jokes because they like saying the name Socrates
That might be Ben Horowitz, the titular partner at A16Z. His Twitter is relatively quiet, mostly just retweeting other A16Z people's tweets.
In his book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things", every chapter begins with a rap lyric from golden-age era hiphop (80s, 90s). It's quite ridiculous contrasting lyrics about street life and hustling to Horowitz's tales of trying to build enterprise unicorns. But in book format, it comes off as well-meaning tribute from a fan and not a cynical way of conflating the struggles of the American poor with say Loudcloud going through a down round.
But on Twitter, which is combative to begin with, him quoting Nas or Jay-Z while bloviating about Web3 would invite derision right away.
But in the end, no one knows the correspondence between money amount and intellectual and lived life weight. That's a market thing. Everyone's option is mixed together and give to a weight of collective market dynamism.
Oh yeah, it ran on 5 operating systems (I used the OS/2 version myself)
The breadth of features that were added between Netscape 1.0 and Netscape 3.0 in 2 year span was pretty astounding at that time. People forget how many critical features were added to Netscape 3.0 that would define so much of the web today and make it commercially viable.
He is an amazing technologist, but it appears to me that when he, and many other VCs, go beyond the boundaries of their technical expertise, they know as much as the guy who get their news from twitter. Their fame and worth sometimes prevent me from commenting on their nonsense on Twitter because I say to myself, who am I to criticize someone who moves billions?
I got the same vibe from a few too many CEO, CTO, and other assorted C- of big and famous companies. The CTO of my previous company, which had a total number of employees greater than 150,000 heads, was terribly underwhelming any time they decided to give their opinion on current business, and the future of the business and of the technology supporting the business. But they were never criticized because they were the CTO of a company of 150,000 people and therefore inherently extraordinary. The principle of authority does not work in science and works a bit more (too much!) in business because the authority can move the market, but not because the authority is right.
It is fine, of course, nobody is a genius everywhere, and as the comment said, he has been incredibly successful, 10,000 more than I have been. But some people, for the worship they get, are more disappointing than others when they show their true, and not assumed, intellectual range.