[iaw]

> Top startups who “graduate” (a success metric) from raising another round of funding from pre-seed to series a burn more than the benchmarked average.

Startups that spend more money need to raise more money, I don't know what I'm supposed to take away from this fact.

[hdubugras]

But startups don't just raise money because they need it, they also have to be given it. That said, there is a question of what parts of this are causal that we plan to tease apart in future analyses.

[iaw]

> they also have to be given it

How many startups needed to but were unable to raise capital in successive rounds? If the failure rate of successive raise attempts is low then I'd suspect that the driving factor would be the desire to raise capital.

Given that we've been in a record bull market for nearly a decade and there are signs of slowing, it may be hard to extrapolate these findings to the future. It would be interesting to try to model what things would have looked like on this data set at lower levels of investment. This type of information would be hugely valuable if there is an investment regime change occurring.

[pixelmonkey]

Matriculation/graduation rate from round to round seems pretty low (that is, new funding failure rate is high), based on this chart cited by pg:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/781743196963540992

Tracked down the original post here:

https://mattermark.com/startup-graduation-rate-surprisingly-...

[hdubugras]

Great data here, thanks! Yes, part of the difficulty of this analysis is the low number of graduates makes it hard to see what's causal.

[hdubugras]

Agreed that from a data perspective, it would be fascinating to see how an investment regime shift would change these benchmark indicators, which should also be useful to startups.