There was a segment on Zoobean (15:00) on Shark Tank
http://abc.go.com/shows/shark-tank/episode-guide/season-05/525-ilumi-zoobean-intellistopper-fort-magic
It seemed pretty clear (unless the editing was done to deceive) that there was no “special sauce” in Zoobean – the founders were not techies yet it seemed to be a “big data” oriented startup. However Mark kept arguing that they HAD special sauce and invested anyways even though they admitted they had NO traction (85 users).
I’m feeling this goes back to why the Boomtrain guys got their seed investment so easily from Angel pad with just a pitch and no prototype. They were MBA folks. Zoobean’s founder had an MBA from Wharton (not mentioned in Shark Tank) and she spent some years at Google post MBA (which was mentioned). Plus the startup already had funding from Mitch Kapor’s fund (not mentioned).
It just seems to me that despite the increasing tech consensus that an MBA is useless, an MBA from a good school can still grease the startup path for you somewhat!