[jm20]

This is easy enough to understand when you decouple “success” vs “VC success”. If you survive as a business long enough you’ll be successful almost by default. It might not be the next Facebook, but it should net you a nice life.

However, a long-lived, yet non-home-run business is actually a negative in a VC portfolio. Because of the nature of VC, they need big wins to give returns to their fund investors. Their model intentionally decreases average success probability for a business as a filtering mechanism to find big wins as quickly as possible, so they can provide those returns to their own investors on an acceptable timeline.