if you think of etsy, twitter, lending club, workmarket, pollenware, and kickstarter, you might struggle to understand why they all fit our investment thesis
it is because they are all networks that are large and growing and disrupt big markets (twitter - news, etsy - sale of artisinal goods, kickstarter - the studio model in entertainment, lending club - consumer lending, pollenware - working capital finance, workmarket - contingent labor)
You're right that the thesis is a test. My question was because it wasn't clear that there was actually a way to fail the test, or at least I wasn't clear on what Mr. Wilson viewed as failing the test. I didn't ask why he didn't do something that hadn't occurred to him, I asked why we he didn't do something on which he makes a pretty deliberate decision.
As I mentioned, in my own experience I heard a lot of "it's a move-fast environment", and I realized that I had no idea what that meant. It's like saying "be tall"--meaningless without a baseline or a standard of comparison, and yet everyone kept throwing around the phrase like it was a concrete observation.
(1) a forward - must be falsifiable to filter
(2) a afterward - need-not-be-falsifiable cya (a/k/a rationalization)
Fred seems to be communicating a variant of (1) fairly credibly; although many VCs sgravitate toward variations of type (2).