That's a good start, but even if no firm outperformed the average, there might still be skill involved. The question is, what is the a priori probability of suc

That's a good start, but even if no firm outperformed the average, there might still be skill involved. The question is, what is the a priori probability of success for a given class of investment? To answer that, you'd have to account for investment opportunities that weren't taken by anybody. But of course there's no way to know whether an unfunded startup would have been successful. So the VC community can rest easy knowing that they are insulated from objective evaluation, unless a VC emerges whose sole criterion for funding is that everyone else turned the investment down.