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Venture capitalists are desperate to hang with the hip, young Web. 20 crowd. While their efforts can pay off, other times they come off looking silly, as WSJ reporter Rebecca Buckman aptly illustrates:
The good: Silicon Valley firm Mayfield Fund, looking for some buzz, hired away Chamath Palihapitiya, 29, from AOL, and it has paid off:
[Mayfield] recently made it a point to introduce goateed 29-year-old Chamath Palihapitiya, whom the firm was thinking of hiring, to an entrepreneur it was trying to court -- Greg Tseng, the 26-year-old co-founder of teen-chat Web site Tagged Inc. He was impressed with Mr. Palihapitiya's knowledge about teens and Web instant-messaging, a business Mr. Palihapitiya was at the time managing at America Online. Later, a Mayfield investor told Mr. Tseng that Mr. Palihapitiya had decided to join the firm. "That definitely was a factor in our decision to go with Mayfield," says Mr. Tseng, who collected $7 million in funding from the firm in February.
The bad: At a pizza-and-beer party attended by youthful software writers and would-be CEOs in Seattle in late May, venture capitalist Greg Gottesman arrived in a smart white jacket that turned some heads. He looked like "he was about to attend brunch at the yacht club," said one attendee. Mr. Gottesman of Madrona Venture Group admits that in hindsight, the jacket was a mistake. While he thought the event would be a small affair, "I got in there, there were 500 people, it was 1,000 degrees, there was beer all over the place," he says. "It wasn't a great place for that jacket."