These funds live for a decade. The most recent funds are almost a decade away from the moment of truth.

To the parenthetical question: You invest something in a few of these funds, and a decade or so later you learn whether you own 1% of Google, or whether all of your VC funds picked the likes of Excite. People invest because Google does exist.

Which reminds me of a classic ah-investment strategy. Say you have €1m of white money and €10m of black money. Invest in 11 high-risk ventures (coffee or tomato futures, say). Later (when the new harvest is in) when you see which one won, go back and fiddle your paperwork so the white money paid for the winner and the black money paid for all the losers. I've heard about this done with volatile foodstuffs, but never startups. Perhaps ten-year funds simply are too slow? Comments, anyone?

The white/black money thing is not in vc land but is super common in "strategy" focused hedge and even mutual funds. You "incubate" 10 funds with very small assets and then after a few years pick the best one and trot it out to the market and pitch it based on its true but misleading performance.

It's p-hacking for funds.

For various reasons this particular shenanigan doesn't happen in venture, though. (hint: it's super easy to scale down a public markets strategy to micro or pilot scale of say 1/10,000)