In his latest guide to startups, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen unwittingly offers a rational explanation for Silicon Valley's Facebook frenzy: Sucking up. First, venture capitalists, in their endless neophilia, started using the social networking site. Then entrepreneurs joined in, too, in hopes of impressing those VCs — brazen attempts, in short at brown-nosing their way to getting funded. The same dynamic applies to Twitter, which is an even better medium for elevator-pitching the Valley's short-attention-span financiers. After the jump, Andreessen's analysis.

... some VCs are aggressive early adopters of new forms of communication and interaction — current examples being Facebook and Twitter. Observationally, when a VC is exploring a new communiation medium like Facebook or Twitter, she can be more interested in interacting with various people over that new medium than she might otherwise be. So, when such a new thing comes out — like, hint hint, Facebook or Twitter — jump all over it, see which VCs are using it, and interact with them that way — sensibly, of course.

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