Since VC is such a #s game it's hard to analyze by example. (Did they get the one outlier that pays for the fund?) I would still like to look at Cloudera as

Since VC is such a #s game it's hard to analyze by example. (Did they get the one outlier that pays for the fund?) I would still like to look at Cloudera as an interesting example. As an investment, they most certainly lost money on it. But if their investment helped Cloudera grow, they may have sold a ton of chips that Cloudera ran on. Big data requires chips. Being able to make money indirectly allows them to benefit from otherwise seemingly unprofitable deals. (And allows execs to hide from mistakes - even less skin in the game)