The "in my experience" sounds suspiciously like "in my experience of being extremely well networked with the partners and them being interested in startups my friends and I work with based on our recommendations alone". Yeah, I'm sure partners are more likely to invest in a YC startup or one with a warm intro from a PG-level figure than one their associate stumbled across, but that's not much help if you're not in YC, and you're going to be even more discriminated against if the partners don't know who you are.

I have a hard time believing VCs pay associates to approach founders if their partners never do any deals based on those introductions.

I agree with you but it's worth noting that associates are mostly paid to do research. A big component of that is reaching out to startups as "an investor" to learn more about their businesses, even if there is no intention to invest ever in them.

This right here. We've spoken to many dozens of Angel, Seed, and later-Stage investors. Principals and Associates are market researchers, not investors. If you're interested in being part of uncompensated market research and you have time on your hands, then take their meetings. If you're trying to raise money? Take meetings with General Partners or Managing Partners, and if you can't do that, then figure out how to do that. It's also very good practice for figuring out how to navigate the political, social, and marketplace incentives of a weird unresponsive system if your business happens to also be positioned to sell to "enterprise", but I digress.

Insofar as identifying great investors that a founder should treat as more than a check in the bank, I've learned through scar tissue that there's a very good qualifying criteria. Every VC talks a lot about being part of the team and how much they'll help you. The great ones don't bother with all the talk. They just start helping.

The Seed-stage ecosystem is also a really weird one. There's a lot of "tech celebrity" investing that distorts the lens of how the machine really works for everyone else, what's misaligned between how Seed is positioned vs. what Seed funds can actually do based on their constraints and incentives. It was quite the learning process for me and my co-founder.

Sounds like you have the experience and the writing skills to describe the (real) struggle for 98% of Seed founders. I’d encourage you to write about it, even if anonymously.

PG has a perspective that is fairly unique in this, both in quantity and in quality. But it is somewhat limited to the SV investment scene which is unique on the planet.

Elsewhere, associates do a lot of the legwork making sure that a VC can cope with the deluge of investment proposals. If you have access to a partner, by all means, use it. But if you're going around cap-in-hand looking for investment get used to dealing with associates. We see about 40 deals per year and the bulk of those have significant contributions from the VC associates.

Some of these are great and effective, some not so great, some downright terrible. It all depends on the firm and even on that particular associate. There are even firms where it is probably more effective to go through an associate because they can effectively become your champion inside the VC.

a16z solved this by making everyone a "partner."