There isn’t enough elapsed time or granular data to verify Friedberg’s prediction about final fund‑life multiples for this cohort of “mid‑tier” venture funds.

Key points:

1. Prediction concerns eventual, fully realized fund outcomes.
   Friedberg was talking about 10‑year‑plus fund lives: historically mid‑tier funds returning around ~1.8x gross over a decade, versus this cycle supposedly ending at only 0.5x–0.7x (i.e., net capital‑losing when all is said and done).(podscripts.co)

2. The vintages he’s implicitly talking about (roughly 2020–2022) are only ~3–5 years old.
   Carta and other benchmark data show that even the 2017 vintage (around 8 years old by 1Q25) still has a median TVPI of about 1.72x but a DPI of only 0.27x—most gains are unrealized even at that age.(ontheflyingbridge.wordpress.com) Silicon Valley Bank analysis cited in the same piece notes that top‑quartile funds typically don’t finish returning capital until roughly year 10–15.(ontheflyingbridge.wordpress.com) That makes it inherently too early to know the final MOIC for 2020–2022 funds, which are much younger.

3. Current data do show underperformance, but not final loss levels.
   Carta’s VC fund performance work (summarized in multiple analyses) finds that recent vintages (2021–2023) have median TVPIs hovering around 0.92–0.99x and median IRRs below zero—clearly weaker than earlier vintages but still close to 1x TVPI, not already at 0.5x–0.7x.(nehaldesai.com)(carta.com) A Wall Street Journal summary of Carta’s report notes that more than 90% of 2021 U.S. VC funds have made no distributions three years in, with median net IRR for 2021 funds around –1.5% and for 2022 funds around –5.8%, again indicating stress but not a realized permanent loss yet.(wsj.com)

4. Mid‑tier segment specifically is not observable at the needed granularity.
   Public benchmark datasets (Carta, AngelList, various LP/consultant reports) provide distributions and TVPIs by vintage, fund size, or percentile, but they do not cleanly isolate Friedberg’s "mid‑tier that historically would have been ~1.8x gross" as a separate category. We can see that many smaller and newer managers are struggling and that fundraising has consolidated toward top‑tier firms,(ft.com) but we cannot empirically confirm that this entire mid‑tier cohort is on track to finish at 0.5x–0.7x.

5. Because venture outcomes are heavily back‑loaded, it’s premature to declare net capital‑losing funds across the board.
   The same Carta data emphasize the J‑curve nature of fund performance: early‑life TVPI and IRR are often low or negative and only improve later as exits occur.(carta.com) Given that the funds in question have most of their life (and potential exit cycles) ahead of them, any claim about their ultimate MOIC is still speculative.

Putting this together: available evidence supports the idea that many recent‑vintage, non‑top‑tier VC funds are currently under pressure and may end up with below‑historical returns. But we are far too early in the fund life cycle—and lack a clean, observable dataset for Friedberg’s precise “mid‑tier” cohort—to say whether they will indeed realize only 0.5x–0.7x over their fund life. Therefore the prediction cannot yet be judged as right or wrong.