There isn’t enough realized exit data yet on the 2020–2022 late‑stage/$1B+ cohort to say whether “a significant share” have ultimately produced only capital-back outcomes for their last-round investors.

Key points:

• The unicorn herd that existed around early 2022 is still largely un-exited. A TechCrunch/Aileen Lee update in Jan 2024 notes that about 93% of current unicorns are still “papercorns” (privately valued with no exit yet), and only about 7% had exited versus ~66% at a similar stage a decade earlier.(techcrunch.com) That means we simply don’t observe final exit prices for most of the companies Jason was talking about.
• Stanford’s Venture Capital Initiative (Ilya Strebulaev) finds that, across a large sample of U.S. unicorns over multiple cycles, the average unicorn exit still returns a large multiple of capital raised (around 31x), and only about 6% of unicorns in their dataset exited below the total capital they had raised.(linkedin.com) That historical pattern does not yet show a broad regime where most late-stage investors merely get their money back.
• However, more recent data do show serious stress in the 2021–2022 vintages: Carta and WSJ report that more than 90% of U.S. venture funds raised in 2021 have made no distributions three years in, with median IRRs negative, largely because exits collapsed after the 2021 boom.(wsj.com) This supports Jason’s directional concern (late-stage deals from that period are underperforming expectations) but doesn’t yet quantify realized exit multiples.
• Post‑COVID unicorn exit multiples have compressed sharply (Stanford data show exit‑to‑capital ratios falling from ~15x in 2021 to roughly 4–6x in recent years), but even those lower figures are still above mere return-of-capital levels.(linkedin.com) Again, this is at the whole‑company level and not specifically for the last private round.
• Secondary-market and private-mark data indicate that a large share of unicorns are now valued below both $1B and their peak private valuations (e.g., ~40% of U.S. VC‑backed unicorns trading below $1B in secondaries; over 80% trading below their 2021–2022 highs), showing that many late-stage positions are underwater on paper.(economictimes.indiatimes.com) But that still does not tell us how many ultimate exits will clear at or just above the last round’s price versus recovering to provide 3–4x returns.

Because:

• the majority of the specific 2020–2022 $1B+ cohort Jason referred to have not yet exited,
• the available research aggregates over many vintages and does not break out realized multiples for that narrow late‑stage slice, and
• current evidence is dominated by interim markdowns rather than final cash outcomes,

we cannot reliably say what share of those late‑stage unicorn deals will end as “pushes” (capital back only) versus 3–4x+ winners. The environment is consistent with his warning being plausible, but the necessary outcome data are not yet observable, so the prediction is best classified as inconclusive (too early to call) rather than clearly right or wrong.