[hfthrowaway]

No risk if you're a VC. Best case, you're net worth increases by orders of magnitude - worst case, you still earn a hefty management fee on all committed capital. If someone else spends five years of their life on a failed venture, its just one company in your portfolio.

Nothing wrong with entrepreneurship. I just find it grating when the benefits are expounded by people who take the exact opposite deal, in terms of asymmetric risk.

[elias]

Not quite. If you are a venture partner and you don't produce returns on the fund, you're out of there. The entire partnership needs to show gains on the fund. In my experience, it's actually pretty easy raising money (either from advertisers, investors, or sponsors) but what's hard is ensuring you give a return on that money. You can measure the success of a venture fund not on how much money they raise the first time, but how much they've raised in total over successive rounds.