> This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.

> If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.

I think it is a little bit more complicated:

I think there exists some very specific personality trait (my guess is either narcissism or at least some predisposition for narcissism; for the rest of this post, let's assume that this is the personality trait) which makes some people prone to this phenomenon.

So, at these hackathons, VCs look for students with two properties:

1. smart (e.g. achieving a good place in the hackathon)

2. has a predisposition for narcissism

It should be obvious why VC have very limited use for people who are not smart. On the other hand, students who don't have a predisposition for narcissism will be much harder to control via the mechanism that you mentioned. So, even if such a student initially get the attention of some VC, he will sooner or later get "dropped" by the VC.