It’s not that they don’t care, of course they want to find winners. It’s just that A) there is so much capital to allocate that they have to allocate to marginal ideas B) their priorities are to raise their next fund which means focusing on vanity metrics like IRR and paper markups C) The incentive structure in VC pushes them to invested based on motivated reasoning. Remember VC returns are cyclical, and many vintages underperform the public markets and particularly large funds do worse simply because they have too much capital to allocate and too few great ideas.

I think they treat success and failure as mostly luck, with a tiny bit of hygiene

The trick is being in the game long enough