Startup founders seeking guidance will often end up guided towards the average. They might talk to different founders and average out what they hear. Or they might talk to an investor who offers advice based on averages.
But building an extraordinary startup is a business of building an outlier. Outliers are not made from doing the average. In my grad school days, I took a class from a professor who coined the term “the flaw of averages.” I think his views apply nicely to startups:
“...whenever an average is used to represent an uncertain quantity, it ends up distorting the results because it ignores the impact of the inevitable variations.”
Averages, by definition, gloss over the variations that underly any distribution. If you want a unicorn, you should be more focused on understanding outliers than on averages.
Oh, and, yes, all of the above can apply to an emerging VC although an emerging VC might not want to create an outlier.