Just guessing here but sounds like you had to have interest in someone else’s crappy/uninteresting idea, which likely was rare. It’s like those cofounder matching sites, most people have a crappy/uninteresting idea they want others to help them with. People without ideas go there and immediately turn away.
There certainly was some of that: dumb ideas that were going nowhere.
Also a lot of genuinely interesting projects had managers with no idea how they could use a 20%-er. Especially if they didn't really believe the person was reliable.
