VCs fund vaporware all the time - the track record of blockchain investments is about $1.5 billion in, $0 out, per http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/ - so this is hardly an implausible statement.
I'm not getting funded to build Ethereum, I'm using Ethereum as a working technology stack. People pay me to build and deploy other projects on top of it, and some of the projects I've built are also in production.
There's a thriving ecosystem of startups, a fair amount of corporate interest, and a shortage of people good at writing smart contracts. I work for a company that provides dev and security auditing, mostly for startups, and business is good.
