The S&P 500 has a mean return on investment of about 10% a year. (It depends on the size of your window for the moving average, as of course the stock market will go down in recessions.) This is the return you'd expect on average from investing in an index fund.
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So the first question I asked is the dumb-and-obvious one: "do VC's, as a class, actually do any better than an index fund?" The answer, reassuringly, is yes; there's a lot more variance in VC returns, but in the long run early-stage VCs make about a 20% yearly return.
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VCs as a class have about the same internal rate of return as Berkshire Hathaway https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2018ar/2018ar.pdf …, a standard example of a very good investment firm.
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An exceptional single *company* can have a higher rate of return, though: Amazon has been growing at an average rate of 36% a year since it IPO'd. If you had to pick between being Jeff Bezos and being a typical VC, on purely money grounds, you'd want to be Bezos.
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It's apparently possible to be a VC firm that raises large funds and underperforms; DCM Ventures is in the top 10 firms for largest funds raised and the IRRs I could find are as follows: DCM II: 0.20% DCM III: 2.1% DCM IV: 4.89% DCM V: 18.69% DCM VI: 3%
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The generalization of this is a martingale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(probability_theory) … Your expected value at the next time step is the same as your present value, but your variance grows over time as you keep reinvesting your winnings. In the long run, you get rich...or go broke.
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A martingale can have a positive expected rate of return but a zero "drift" term (modeled as a geometric Brownian motion, e^(mu*t + sigma W_t), martingales have mu=0.)
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I don't like that you put investment in quotes. I think you misunderstand what a coin flip is. A straight up 0 EV coin flip is 50% you lose the coin, 50% you get the coin. If you can win an entire coin, but only lose half a coin, and the odds are equal, that's +EV.
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In other words it is a positive yielding investment. if I can either double or halve my number of fruit trees, with 50% odds, if we make that bet across 1,000 orchards on average next year we're going to have 25% more trees! This is a value-generating play, not a gamble.
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