Unless I am missing something, that's how you would expect it to be. The failure rate is very high for venture capital and returns concentrated in a handful of outsized winners, so you would expect from, a large sample size, for investments to be predictably poor no matter what public information or indicator you use, such as eye color, hair color, sector, whatever. EMH only applies to public markets, not early stage private ones anyway. I am skeptical of anything published on SSRN, zero peer review to publish there.