[engendered]

The overwhelming majority of those "winners" fail. These funds aren't anointing the king, but rather are just trying to make a bet, and it's a bet they usually lose. As you said, their funding gives the entrant a leg up (usually if there's a significant capital cost), but in this case such funding provides astonishingly little advantage of scale.

This isn't an example of a bubble. It's an example of a really comically silly investment.

[flyinglizard]

"winners" failing is not much of an indication - obviously there is a staggering number of investment entities and often they are competing with other "winners" (look at the payment market, with Stripe, Balanced, Braintree etc, they all raised serious money) and someone usually comes out on top.

Whether or not Magic is a smart investment - I can't really tell, but I suspect that if I were to choose between Magic and Twitter back when they were just ideas, I would bet on the former.

[kra34]

Yeah I have to agree it's actually really hard to fail when backed by one of the bigger VC's, if you're on the road to failure they can just bully one of their former portfolio unicorns to acquire you with post IPO Opm dollars. See Twitter's recent bail out of Foursquare care of Fred Wilson. There are no losers in this game.

[flyinglizard]

Even without doing the OPM arrangement, it's very sobering to see companies that fail on tech, product and people level hoovering up gobs of money due to their investor momentum. At some point, an IPO is the only way out (well, that's the best kind of OPM, isn't it).