[rlucas]

The people who decide what is "incredibly well" are the institutional investment consultants, e.g. Cambridge Associates, who advise the actual investors in venture (and every other asset class) what is going on in reality.

The yardstick is not absolute. It's not even relative to numbers that consumers / the public (you?) generally see.

It's relative to all the other venture funds (typically grouped by vintage year) and relative to the other asset classes to which an investor might allocate -- modified by the historical and projected covariances among them.

To make it concrete: 20% IRR might be "incredibly well" in some vintage years (say, 2000?) but it might be "median" in some other vintage years (say, 1995?).

And (despite everyone saying they only want top quartile managers for everything, just like Lake Woebegon's children) a rational institutional investor might well look at venture in a period where it's been lagging the public markets, and decide it's quite rational and profit-maximizing to keep allocating to it, precisely because it doesn't march in lockstep with the other asset classes.

(And, agreed: there are much easier money games to play and venture is decidedly a "get rich slow" scheme.)