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I only ever found one foolproof system to win the lottery, and it allowed me to win on every single ticket. I owned a retail store that sold lottery tickets. The retailer gets a small commission on every sale, and one on any ticket cashed in at the store.

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This is basically the same as the VC fund model. They get annual carry (ie percentage) on every fund, and then get a percentage of the gains for every exit.

Often this is "two and twenty" (aka 2% annual carry, plus 20% of the gains). Pretty awesome skimming.

Carry is the 20 (carried interest) and 2 is the management fee.

A shocking number of VC's still fail to make much money. The amount of effort to source and manage investments eats up a whole lot of those management fees, and the 20% carry is often after preferential returns up to a certain level and a lot of funds never reach that level.

(I worked for a VC until end of last year; still years of waiting to see if the carry I vested will pay out anything at all)

Sell the picks and the shovels

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