> a crowd of extremely smart people

I don't disagree with your broader point, but have spent enough time with enough a16z partners to say they're just people. Not outright stupid, but not extremely smart, either. And their error rate is pretty high.

Which...to some extent is by design. It's part of a VC's job to make bad bets. Sometimes the price of getting into a deal at all is getting in on insane terms, but you still do it because that one investment could return the entire fund. Maybe Thinking Machines is a winner, maybe it's another Clubhouse. We'll see.