The clean-up crew stays deliberately out of sight [...] their clients think consulting them will constitute a capitulation. An admission that what they're running is a business, that their career is in the end just a career, that gravity has some kind of purchase on their meteoric trajectories.

A lot of the younger VCs are themselves highly successful founders, and the contingency of their own success hasn't yet sunk in. [...] Why do they deserve their good fortune? What does it mean?

This matters because only those who have encountered the most stupefying, most inexplicable success will end up funding the next generation of startups. [...] Among those who do have that kind of cash, their sense of reality can be deeply warped - perhaps it almost has to be a little bit, shell-shocked as they all can be by their extraordinary luck.