"...you fail you've got to find another career"... I think thats true in a textbook theoretical sense - but not in practice. There is very little 'hard failure

"...you fail you've got to find another career"... I think thats true in a textbook theoretical sense - but not in practice. There is very little 'hard failure' which causes a VC to lose everything. Their incentive structure is not that dis-similar to a government official. The gov't official has far less upside, for probably similar downside (short-term embarrassment). Secondly - there are many cases where governments have picked winners - e.g. EU (or EC at the time) choice of 'GSM' as a mobile standard. Of course, we don't know what the counter-factual here is - what would have happened without GSM having being made a Europe-wide standard...