I've definitely seen smooth talkers with great resumes get through any other filter, but I've never seen a false positive with the technical interview.
I've seen way more than a few false positives from tech interviews, along with tremendous amounts of false negatives: People with backgrounds of being transformative to teams and organizations that just couldn't look good enough while solving random algorithm problems to save their lives.
It's just hard to see the kinds of things a company misses when they keep insisting in asking people about graph algorithms and implementing red black trees, because those same companies just never get to see the kind of people that you get when you do things differently.
I currently work for a company that does relatively traditional tech interviews and does 95% of sourcing from big schools and ver well known tech companies. I fail to see a major difference between my coworkers here vs my coworkers at places where your average dev went to a midwest state school and was never asked an algorithm question during interview.
I guess you could counter that you need to have a 10x longer technical interview that covers all these aspects, but a long interview process is going to filter out all the candidates who are good enough not to have to put up with one.
I am not sure why you think women and people of color are extra bad at whiteboard problems. In my experience the applicant pool for technical and engineering fields is heavily biased towards white, asian and Indian males, but that happens way before the stage of the whiteboard interview.
Any interview/test/discussion without overwhelming objectivity will be subjective by nature and therefore subject to emotional bias.
How does this prepare founders for the eventuality of needing to sell their protect in a similar way that they are pitching their demo?
Unfortunately, start-ups don't function like normal businesses. If they can't get their name out there sufficiently, they'll die before the market takes its sweet time "figuring it out."
Demo-day results are suggestive, just like SAT scores. It's a measure of the founder's ability to sell (which is arguably the most important task for a CEO).
It doesn't matter if it's a great product. Amazing products have been created and destroyed when the founders couldn't market it to an audience.
Much like your inclusion of this typo, maybe it's the criteria for the "eventuality" that is problematic. Does the VC industry have a means by which to take imperfect people seriously? Before they're a CEO with $10B in funding, that is.
But the writer has some good points, including demo days favor men more than women, as well as extroverts:
For entrepreneurs who don’t pitch well — or who don’t fit investors’ mental image of a successful entrepreneur — Demo Days may hurt more than they help. The preparation teaches entrepreneurs to focus on transactions more than relationships (when, in reality, an in-depth conversation after the pitch matters a lot more than the pitch itself).
The Demo Day format is not ideal for investors, either. If you’re picking who pitches best, not who runs the best business, you’re not getting the best results.
What I have seen happening at accelerators, universities, and startup events in the Boston area is this intense focus on pitching. It's all about showing off the team, presenting a problem, sharing market or usage stats, prepping a slick video, and getting the deck just right. This approach emphasizes superficial qualities over the product or service being built. Product demos are almost an afterthought, and information about build progress or actual discussions with customers are turned into a couple of bullets on slides 4 and 5.
So yeah, by all means, ditch the demo days. But don't assume that focusing on "building relationships" will solve the problems of investors favoring certain types of people, or glossing over product and customer discussions. Extroverted founders and talented salespeople can project empathy, ask the right questions, and send other signals that are more likely to suggest a "good relationship" to investors. These qualities/skills will not determine who runs the best business.