That said, what interests me most about this subject is what it says about the direction of VC investing. There’s already been a tremendous amount of angst about a paucity of early-stage VC investment over the past six or seven years, largely driven by the search for early exits. In life sciences, for instance, that’s driven a boom in “specialty pharma” companies that buy up discarded drugs or reformulate generics. Such companies may well be worthy and economically viable, but they’re not remotely innovative in the same way as your typical early-stage biotech or medical-device firm.

So as VC money moves downstream, it raises natural questions about the extent to which these firms are still primarily funding transformational innovations, or just chasing dollars wherever they can find them. Now, NEA is big enough that perhaps it can do all of that at the same time. But that’s a proposition that seems worth examining from time to time, which is what I’ve tried to do here.