Well. This story about how many of the early adopters actually "count" could have a twist - have a look at fakezilla:

FakeZilla.com traffic simulators are designed to send as many unique hits to your server as it can handle. Web page requests are routed through a massive list of anonymous proxy servers which can be defined by you. Counters and banners "see" these fake hits just as if a real user was browsing your site. When used with the Web Server Log extractor the fake hits and traffic appear 100% realistic- you can't tell the difference between FakeZilla traffic and real traffic!

Your venture capitalists can't tell, either - at least not until it's too late. It's simply amazing how many tools exist to create spam or fake traffic now.