So over on TechDrawl Dave Walters has a post that is stirring up the restless yet once again. Toward the end Dave poses a series of questions.

So the real question is: when the revolution happens, will you help push
it forward or will you defend the old school? What side of history will
you be on? I ask the question equally of investors and entrepreneurs
because it will be ours to live day-in and day-out. Will you mentor
younger entrepreneurs? Will you make investments based on passion for an
idea not an actuarial view of the world? Will you lead the community?
Will you become an angel following a successful exit? Will you finally
welcome the consumer Internet with open arms? Will you give away 10%
more of your company to make it 70% larger? And most importantly, are
you willing to celebrate failure enough times to have a real crack at
creating the next Facebook or Google?

While passion is important, investors do not invest on passion alone, they want potential.  And I thought this part of the world sometime ago that goading investors is not a really good strategy.  They are not going to invest in the consumer Internet unless that is where they came from and they see a deal that they like.  There are people that do this, though not a lot.  The only way that is going to be solved is a big success in the space.

Sure Sig exiting the game is going to be leaving a big hole.  But he is certainly going out with a bang if what I am hearing about term sheets is true.  Not only is the money is laying down going to be missed but the organization that he brings to the deals is paramount.  While I certainly don't know, I would say that in a typical deal that Imay leads they throw down $250k with the terms and grab another $500k from seven independent angels.  Imlay herds all these cats and get the deal closed.  It's a lot of work.

And it's a lot of money.  Again, I don't know, but let's say that Imlay has $25 million outstanding right now across more then 30 deals.  In order to step into this role and maintain the proper asset class balance a person would need to have a net worth of $500 million.  I don't know anyway outside of John Imlay that has that type of coin.  And I am telling you eight people getting together to do a deal where the big cat can write a $100k check is not going to happen five or ten times a year in this town.

The real questions you need to be asking yourself are how do I make this thing go without taking rather expensive angel financing when the value of my company is so low, how do I get a product, how do I get users.

There are people in Atlanta that are doing this with consumer focused Internet companies.  But they are not reading FoG or TechDrawl.  They are building a business.