How do you know what your "best ideas" are? And, are they better than the average of those 4000 startups? Are they better than the top 1% of those 4000 startups?

It's not clear to me that, starting from here, NVidia is going to be a fast-growth company - especially not compared to a group of startups.

its possible they are using NVidia as a proxy for a bet on Machine Learning.

This is a bet on AI and machine learning. Not video games. NVidia is currently the publicly traded company that best fits that narrative. If you think it will get big, this is the company you buy.

> the bandwidth of the people making the investment decisions

why do they need to make any decision at all - if it's like lottery, why not invest in all 4000, let it run wild? The survivors after their money runs out are the good ones.

Presumably bad ROI

That's a big presumption isn't it?

It was accepted wisdom that you had to pick individual stocks until Vanguard popularized the index fund and now it's accepted wisdom to do the opposite.

It's one thing to pick up stocks of market leaders (which may or may not be having a good time this year around) and another thing is to pick stock of noname startups from the bottom of the pile. Far more risk.

There's a reason early stage VCs do dd, it's to weed out complete garbage which wouldn't ever possibly do any return. Probably it is not worth scaling that and easier and more measurable to just stick such big amounts of money into later stages.