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Interestingly, the report indicates that only ~50% of their dataset has negative returns, and the mean IRR of the success cohort is 35%.

This is both much higher rate of success and somewhat lower return than I would have expected. I guess the takeaway is that many companies (that reach seed round anyway) have middling success?

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Study author here.

You can think of the AngelList investment data as being split into three roughly equal-sized groups: markdowns, markups, and no valuation updates.

The reported IRRs are actually relatively high and the return multiples (which are compounded IRRs) are relatively low. That's because there are lots of one- and two-year-old companies in the dataset and---as we show---IRRs and investment durations are negatively correlated.

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