Are they bad at avoiding that though? Or are we greatly extrapolating from
one VC in
one high profile case: because that is the actual hilarious part of WeWork, it was basically entirely funded by just one VC that kept doing more rounds.
Additionally, the nature of VC is that it is high risk: you're supposed to have 9 failures for every success. So just from an "amount" of companies perspective, they're always going to seem "bad" at this I guess. That's why I used Facebook as an example. It's unfortunate that it takes very little time for everyone to forget, but the valuation of Facebook seemed ridiculous at the time. That's the nature of the beast: it's really hard to tell the winners from the losers, and thus VC is a necessarily risky enterprise. PG talks about this here: http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html
That's why my point is that the true problem is if the capital comes from the wrong place, namely non-traditional sources of capital funding these funds due to loss of any other viable more conservative investments.
