Back in 1999, before being exposed first hand to the genus VC, I went to a First Tuesday gathering in London.

For those of you who are too young or who have wiped the years 1999 and 2000 from your memories in self-protection, I'll explain. First Tuesday was primarily a networking event that started in London and spread to various cities throughout the world.

The idea was that you paid £10 entry and were given a badge. The colour of your badge meant you were a VC, an entrepreneur looking to raise funds or "other" which usually meant you were a lawyer. VC's were surrounded by furiously pitching entrepreneurs and the Others hung around awkwardly wondering why they were there and occasionally trying to engage a resting entrepreneur in conversation. About 1,000+ people attended each event.

The venues were closely guarded secrets and tickets to the events, apart from for the "players" (ie the VC's) were allocated on the day by lottery.

You had to have been there to believe it.

After an hour or so of this feeding frenzy, the delegates were given a talk by some luminary loosely connected with this new media thing or raising VC money. I remember one such talk given by a most amusing Canadian gentleman, whose claim to fame was something like that he was the 35th employee in a VC funded start-up on the West Coast (of the US).

Anyway, his talk consisted entirely of telling us that VC's were herd-like drongo's who wouldn't know a good idea if it came up to them at a First Tuesday event and said "Hey, I'm a good idea".

I remember thinking that he couldn't possibly be right. These were intelligent, experienced, battle scared, brilliant giants of men, surely? And then I met some VC's and - my opinion hasn't changed :-)

Seriously, like in any business there's good ones and bad ones and even the good ones make mistakes. But every now and again the herd-like characteristic emerges to prove that there's more than a smidgen of truth in what my Canadian pal was saying.

For instance, Moco News reports an article if the WSJ

over the past few weeks a gaggle of mobile-game start-ups breezed through expansion and late-stage financing. They've left a line of eager venture capitalists at the door and in some cases accepted more money than entrepreneurs had planned.

- "It was role reversal," says Sorrent CFO Paul Zuzelo. "We had VCs cold-calling us." (San Jose Business Journal)