Your business is a fringe case that you admit takes "super extra precautions", which clearly doesn't represent the majority of merchants. In fact, as a consumer I can't remember the last time a merchant took an imprint of one of my cards.
You would understand what he brings to the table if you had any idea how difficult it is to create "one previous successful project" on the scale of Digg. Kevin has demonstrated an ability to create something with a huge following from nothing, which is a skill set that your average Google developer does not have.
Sure, it looks cool, but it appears to require a lot of slow and inefficient physical movement to accomplish the most basic of tasks. Imagine a bunch of cubical works sitting at their desktops waving their arms around trying to navigate their computer's file system :-)