I thought it was very interesting that 9 (!) of the 100 people on the 2012 Forbes Midas List of top tech investors had Facebook as their “big deal”.  The venture funds that had early Facebook investments will show very, very good performance relative to their peers (to the point where it’s not even fair to compare).  Early angel investors will get a nearly 10,000X return on their money.  That pays for a lot of writeoffs.

This shows how skewed and concentrated technology returns have gotten.  In the old days, a venture investor might have hoped for one home run in 10 for the investment math to work.  Now, it’s more like 1:100, or even worse.  How many groups went through Y Combinator before Dropbox and Airbnb?

For many Internet software and mobile investments, I think this is a symptom of the “gorilla ecosystem” that I’ve written about.   Many startups end up paying a tax, in some form, to Amazon, Google, Apple, and/or Facebook, causing a significant fraction of startup value creation to flow to the gorillas.

Net, net:  instead of a nice stream of $1b exits for the last 5-10 yrs, we’re going to have one gigantic $100b exit.