I've been a partner in several venture funds and am or have have been an investor (LP) in around 25 VC funds since 1995. I reach the same conclusion as Fred on slightly different data - every successful venture fund that I've been a part of in any way has had at least one deal that effectively returned the fund (I'm changing the assertion a little as I'm including the funds where there were several deals that each returned at least 75% of the fund.)

In 100% of the cases where there wasn't at least a deal that returned 75% of the fund, the fund was a loser. I can't think of case that I've been involved in or seen the data from a situation where this hasn't been true (I'm sure this is at least one case, but my assertion would be that it's an outlier.) nullnullnull