How do you establish that a VC has any skill? If the game is to throw a load of money at different firms, in the hope of getting 99 losers and a massive winner, how do you tell the good ones from the bad ones? Keep in mind there's noise; a guy with alpha might have a bad day before going to meet Uber or Facebook. He then gets 100 losers instead of 99. Or vice versa.
This is called skewness in traditional markets. People can sell options and make money quite often, until they blow up, ie the reverse of what I described above.
There also seems to be opportunity in less-than-insane growth. I've invested in a couple of firms personally, via connections. Small businesses, with a few sticky customers, and decent scale potential (they both sell via the internet) that need a little bit of cash to grow. You can't throw a few million bucks at any one of them, but you can get a reasonable rate of return. I suspect there's opportunities like this everywhere, but the VC theme creates so much attention people forgot there was an investment world before VC was a thing.