Those aren't contradictory. If you put the two statements together, the claim is "real investors should understand more industries". You can agree or disagree with that, but it reconciles the two pretty simply.
I get the impression that investment banking culture is biased against that in the sense that it does not hire polymath geek types. It hires suits with finance degrees, or people who have a demonstrated record building businesses. Since we just had a huge web boom, the latter category is going to be stacked full of people who get the web and only the web. Hence we're spacing out our tweets, not commercializing space.
I think the modal background for VC is still someone who came over from an investment bank, and your statement doesn't really characterize their hiring. Investment banks don't hire suits. They hire kids. They hire smart kids from Harvard and Wharton, increasingly those with nerdier backgrounds, but ultimately kids who don't know anything. Then they impart unto these kids their incredible institutional experience with financial analysis. And from there, those kids go forth and become VCs and PE guys and HF guys and CFOs, but they take with them a singular focus on financial analysis.
This is why Wall Street hates Apple and loves GE and relegates VC off to the side. And that's also why hyperloop doesn't get funded. Because the people with billions to throw around, which the VCs don't have, can do the financial math to realize that projects like that aren't going to be sufficiently lucrative to justify the enormous risk.
> I get the impression that investment banking culture is biased against that in the sense that it does not hire polymath geek types.
But they do -- they's called "quants." They aren't as popular as they were 20 years ago, but they're still hired. And they're notoriously incapable of assessing risk versus reward.
I think "I care about an industry" versus "I understand an industry because I care about money" is one (of many) things that sets Buffett apart from your average person throwing a couple bucks at a company.
