Allow me to add to the skepticism:

Here’s the deal: When you successfully solicit financial and reputational buy-in from a variety of established individuals in the tech space, they take on some of your risk. After a few years of talking about it, nobody wants to admit that the technology is average. Everybody wants to wait and hope for the best.

This is NOT true. As an advisor, even as a member of the advisor board, it is more often than not a vision and mission you commit too than an actual product. It is normal for advisors (at times) not to be able to influence outcomes (or tech) and thus they are also exempt from any form “of your risk”.

More specifically, looking at that list of advisors, you will notice that all advisors could have a possible interest in the mission because it could be integrated in their own projects:

• Stripe: exponentially expands the reach of STRIPE;
• WordPress: international democratriced payment currency, also tip system, for content creators, and even for merchants and customers;
• Apache: see WordPress, and also Utopian
• YCombinator: each YC alumni could technically implement a payment system also available to the unbanked
• AngelList: see YC.

This further proves that advisors often don’t take on any part of the risk. They have their own agenda and they subscribe to the vision. A vision to which they think they can contribute, but they are not involved in any of the technical stuff which defines how good or bad a product eventually is. Then again, MySpace, eBay, and also CraigsList never were the best possible platforms yet they still became the one product. Technical excellence/supremacy isn’t a condition at all. Adoption is what matters. See also: BTC and ETH.

I am still long on Stella because with more and more nations looking into providing regulatory frameworks there are still cash-out hurdles anywhere beyond the EU-sphere. Which, obviously, affects the success/adoption of Stellar. Once there are more options available (again) the main question will be whether there is enough punch [both financially and technically] to convince stake holders to integrate Stellar.

That’s when the role of the advisors can become interesting. Will their own Rolodex come to play a role?

Side question: would Matt Mullenweg have become a potential advisor to Steem if not for Stellar? :D