First Round 10 Year Project
Really cool of First Round to share this data. Whenever I see interesting data it makes me ask more questions and these are some of the things I'm wondering about after reading the post.Female founders outperforming male teams: My hunch would be that the bar for women to get funded (at least historically) has been higher than men so the female led start-ups would be a better calibre of company. Related, since this is based on investment performance, could it be that the female founders received smaller initial investments so performing on par with male teams would make the ROI look better?Halo effect: This to me would indicate that we shouldn't be encouraging fresh college graduates to work at start-ups and instead get experience at a more mature company. I wonder how much tenure they had at their halo company prior to founding the start-up and how it ties with the average age of founding.Solo founders perform worse: I wonder what happens if you frame this from the point of view of the founder. If the solo founder had a $100 return and the team had a $260 (160% better) return; assuming equal dilution and equal division between founders, solo founder get's $100, a two founder team get $130 each (30% better), a three founder team gets $85 (15% worse).Next big thing from anywhere: Also interesting, I'd like to see how this varies by referral source. Do companies referred by other investors perform better than non-investor referrals (or can other investors pick companies better than social connections).