What that seems to mean is that if you:
* have a persona that at least superficially seems driven, ambitious, likely to succeed, and
* you tell a convincing story about a market that might experience explosive growth, and
* you have any kind of track record of any sort to make it hard to write you off as a total bozo, and
* you have some sales skill, so you can manage the pitch process and create pressure to VC firms, then
you're probably fundable even if you think testing means "practicing instead of really playing".
These kinds of pitches seem very different from the kinds of things people write in Show-HN: postings. In particular, these pitches aren't meant to be reasonable.
This is way more of a response than you were looking for; sorry, I just had to get this out, since all I can think of when I read about Color is how good an illustration it is of VC cliches.
I had this happen to me first hand, more than once. When raising money ~5 years ago a high profile VC stopped replying to my emails. Around 2 years later when I was associated with a high-profile project he emailed me out of the blue and asked me up to lunch. As we sat down with coffee, I said to him 'I haven't talked to you in a while, this whole time I thought you thought that I suck'. He laughed and said 'ye we decided not to invest in that'.. urgh. I found it funny and we talked about VCs not saying no for the first 10 minutes.
I continued to make light of it and at the end of that meeting after talking about a number of projects, I said 'I will take 7 days of no email as a no'.
Having a $850M exit on your resume makes you look pretty good when you're pitching an otherwise crazy idea.
The only thing I would add is the fact that you have to know all the players and all the buzz and buzz words.
You don't want to say "no I don't know who Fred Wilson is or who Mike Arrington or PG is etc. Or you're not up on what's going on in the startup community. (Which could happen with someone who has a killer track record from a different industry.) In other words you know the lay of the land.
I might suggest cough having the players know you. There's a famous line in Chicago politics: "Don't be sent by nobody" (An apocryphal applicant, on asking for a job at a local politician's office, was asked "Who sent you?" "Nobody." "Kid, one piece of advice: don't be sent by nobody.")
