To your point, I wonder if there is some sort of calculus within YC: Company A has 1% potential of a $10B exit, Company B has 50% potential of $100MM/year ... what do we do? Cold logic says we invest in Company A over Company B (not that this is zero-sum), but they can only make so many investments and the real numbers are much smaller than one-percent. Whereas, a series of conservative investments keeps them solvent long-term, while the bigger exits slow boil.