I suppose investors are brand names when you get down to it. Ever notice how movie previews always begin with "from the producer/writer/director of <popular movie x>"? Same thing here.

I'm curious why serial entrepreneurs don't get the same credit though. Perhaps investors just invest in more companies than serial entrepreneurs start.

The importance of the <popular movie person> mentioned in the movie preview is directly proportional to how good the movie is going to be. e.g., "From the director of Avatar..." is probably going to be a good movie. "From the sound editor of Forrest Gump" doesn't have quite the same chances.

I can't recall what movie it was, but I once saw a trailer that touted itself as "from the company that distributed <not very good movie>." The movie proved to be terrible.

My impression is that serial entrepreneurs do get such credit, c.f. Jim Clark in the Netscape days

Hacker News is reasonably guilty of this. How many headlines have we seen with something like (YC W10) in it?

I figure this is more like a secret handshake. Presumably anyone reading news at news.ycombinator.com will have an inherent interest in companies that YC invests in.

Not that (YC W10) is a very subtle signal, but it's signaling something to the audience.

Investor names are usually mentioned to establish social proof, but I find that it's rarely the case that the article itself focuses on the investor not the company.

For his example RockMelt, I just picked 4 random stories from Google News -- most of them mentioned Marc Andreesen but he wasn't the focus of the article.

Is there an endorsement stronger than real money?