What is the relevance of fund life?

Over at AskTheVC there's a useful post on "What Is The Relevance of Life Terms of VC Funds?". This reflects on a comment made to me by a one of the largest European Tech specialist VC's the other day. I was told that although his fund had closed only recently they had already lined up the fundamental materials/basic technology investments for that new fund and they would make up their first year or two's activity on the 10 year fund due to the long "time to realisation" of this kind of work. They were looking then to move on to investments that were more software orientated for years 3-5 of the fund as these are "further up the stack", and therefore had a shorter exit timeframe. This is a rather stark position, but I suspect it's not too different from most funds, and well worth bearing this in mind if you're approaching investors.