I ducked into the “What Makes Great Entrepreneurs Great” session this morning and listened to Michael Arrington and Ron Conway explore and mull over a survey results collected from over 300 startups during a ten-year period.
The conclusions were not totally surprising. The ideal startup is one in which there are multiple founders all under the age of 30.
This holds very true for ventures that exit with a $25 million and over valuation, and more so for ones lucky enough to reach the $500 million mark.
In some ways, these startups parallel the success arc of a good ball club: youth and teamwork, at least among the originators.
Although some of the data has to be looked at with a critical eye. In a back-and-forth between Conway and Arrington over Facebook’s founding, it’s clear that this title is something that can get bestowed in lieu of immediate payment or compensation. There may be one real founder and then a bunch of “founders”.
In any case, multiple founders is a natural way to divide responsibilities between business and product. Napster: Fanning (product), Parker (business). Google, well they’re both technical but Page is more the business head.
One other striking result is that experience counts heavily, regardless of whether the previous gigs ended in success.
Of the startups with a $500 million+ exits, a stunning 90% had founders with prior founding experience.
One counter-intuitive factoid: about 35-40% of the startups in the $25 million bucket didn’t have founders who were technical.
However, this anomaly doesn’t find its way into $500 million data set.
But overall, if you’re young, technical, and can find a compatible partner—and the data shows that this is still a male game—then as a well known business consultant once said:
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!