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So their conclusion is based on just looking at non negative investments? If so how useful is this data? Because there is no way to practically know what investment will be a positive or negative investment. In other words, there is no way to broadly index among all non-negative investments.

The paper should have compared brodly indexing among all startups vs hand picking possible winners. This is practical and avoid any survivorship bias.

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Of course there is a way to broadly index among all non-negative seed investments: by broadly indexing among all seed investments.

The fraction of money-losing investments in a population will affect, for instance, whether we would expect the typical investor making five investments at random to make or lose money. But regardless of whether losers are 10%, 50%, or 90% of the investment pool, if the winners are drawing from an unbounded mean power law then broadly indexing raises an investor's expected return.

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