The 'picking winners' part is most certainly providing value! If you can, more accurately than at random, look at a bunch of ideas and say which ones are going to be successful and which aren't, so that you (or others) can fund effort toward the likely-to-be-successful ideas and not the unsuccessful ones, that is very valuable and deserves to be rewarded.
Indeed, this is the fundamental contribution of capitalism to practical economic performance. It’s simply the most efficient and successful approach to allocating capital to productive enterprises. It’s still vulnerable to abuse of course, as any approach to allocating resources can be, hence the need for regulation.
Regulation is also vulnerable to abuse. The naive “solution” to that is more regulation. This is great for successful incumbents since it raises barriers to entry for potential competitors.
There will always be competition for resources. It’s my observation that every proposal to eliminate that coincidentally allocates more resources to the proposer or a group he identifies with.
Laissez-faire is no exception. In fact I’ve never heard of one.
If you have enough capital and social connections you can pick randomly and still get a return on your investment even if you provided negative value for society. Some monopolistic corporation will end up buying the startup you invested in for a lot of money, shut it down so that the corporation's shareholders will take on the cost but the corporate monopoly means that they won't be affected much anyway. The rest of society ends up paying for that exit through lost opportunity cost because that statup used social manipulation and advertising money to steal customer, supplier and investor attention away from more deserving projects.
Investors win, founders win, everyone else loses. To say that it's a zero sum game is actually a very generous way to put it.
This is still creating value.