Available evidence since 2021 does show directionally more VC‑like risk‑taking in public markets, especially among retail traders. Studies and market data document that individuals strongly overweight “lottery‑like” assets—low‑priced, highly volatile, positively skewed stocks—and that this preference has persisted or intensified, including after the pandemic period.(studylib.net) Retail traders have also flocked to extremely high‑risk instruments such as zero‑days‑to‑expiry equity and index options, where most positions expire worthless and a small minority can produce very large gains, a payoff profile that is explicitly described by researchers as “lottery‑like.”(wealthmanagement.com) At the same time, retail participation in equities and options remains structurally elevated versus a decade ago, with households now responsible for roughly 20% or more of U.S. equity volume and a large share of short‑dated options activity, and platforms like Robinhood openly targeting aggressive, speculative users and even planning vehicles to give small investors access to concentrated portfolios of high‑growth AI companies.(accountinginsights.org) Given that the cross‑section of stock returns is inherently power‑law distributed—with a small fraction of companies responsible for essentially all long‑run wealth creation—any concentrated basket of early‑stage or speculative public equities will mechanically tend to have a venture‑like outcome profile (a few big winners, many failures, some modest results).(econpapers.repec.org)

However, the prediction is about investors increasingly building portfolios of early‑stage, high‑risk public equities whose realized performance distribution resembles venture portfolios. Current research and public data largely focus on trading activity in specific instruments or on aggregate participation, not on the full long‑term return distribution of typical retail (or even professional) portfolios constructed since 2021. Many households still hold broad index funds or diversified ETFs as core holdings, and there is no clear, quantitative documentation that VC‑style, highly concentrated baskets of early‑stage public stocks have become the dominant or even a clearly measured class of portfolios, as opposed to a prominent but hard‑to‑size niche.(coinlaw.io) Because the behavioral trend is qualitatively consistent with Friedberg’s thesis but the key empirical claim—widespread portfolios whose overall performance distribution truly mirrors venture funds—cannot be directly verified or falsified with available data, the forecast is best judged ambiguous rather than clearly right or clearly wrong.