Comment by rich_sasha
21 hours ago
It is the average that matters in the end. How much new money flows into VC per year? Some number of $1e9 - hundreds perhaps? What happens to it?
If its all a folly and the money is burnt, it cannot last. But otherwise, these VCs investing at what looks like crazy valuations can't all be idiots.
EV is not a reasonable metric here. When the ventures are 99+% likely to fail, and individual funds don't invest into more than a few handfuls of companies, you don't have enough variance to promise that fund returns will approach some kind of average. As long as at least one VC fund produces the kind of returns necessary to attract that level of investment at that level of risk, then what matters is not some kind of an average but the managing partners' reputations and networks.
> it cannot last
It cannot last because VC managing partners are human and are subject to human frailties, greed and pride among them. If most actively traded funds cannot succeed at producing sustained above-market returns over time (i.e. making active stock market picks, compared to index funds), then what else other than hubris could suggest an ability to pick unproven startups, sustainably, over time?