It is easy to be rude about the venture capital industry. So here goes. The criticism runs that the VC sector is full of too many over-funded, ill-disciplined chancers who pass off hype for reality, groupthink for insight and luck for good judgment.

What’s more, a staggering 95 per cent of VC firms fail to make a decent enough return to justify the risks their investors run. Yet it is hard to detect a blush as they extract extravagant management fees for mislaying their backers’ money. Well might Jim Clark, one of Netscape’s founders, describe venture capitalists as “velociraptors”, intelligent but rapacious dinosaurs.

We may also wonder how far the current mindset of the VC industry is responsible for the slowdown in new business formation and lack of economic dynamism in the US. All too often, addicted to capital-light, metric-heavy software businesses, VCs are failing to bet big enough on the breakthrough technologies that tackle our biggest challenges, such as climate change or cancer.