When you suddenly have a big financial windfall, all kinds of people crawl out of the woodwork and find you. One of those people introduced me to this VC. And BTW, I ended up losing well over a million dollars through him. It turned out that he was more of a VC wannabe than a real VC. He had never actually raised a real VC fund. He had just made some money of his own and used it to get himself a fancy office on the Third Street Promenade, and then he used that to get a few rich suckers (including me) to write him some checks. He wasn't a fraud -- all of the investments were legit. He just didn't have good deal flow because he didn't have the right connections. He was hewing to the fake-it-till-you-make-it philosophy. But he never made it.