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by tptacek
4728 days ago
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This new trope of yours is extremely irritating. I come from a solidly middle class background. My parents didn't even pay for college --- I didn't go. Two of my siblings are in the arts, and one is a lawyer at a domestic violence clinic. I'm on startup #5 (year 8), with no VC funding at all. 2 of the previous startups I was at (one of which I cofounded) were VC funded. Not only am I not a trust-fund type, but nobody I ever worked with was. The founders of startup #2 for me just sold their third company. Both were middle-class Canadians with no "connections", just a solid professional track record. My 2 cofounders at startup #3 were well-off; both were working professionals, like me. Startup #4 was a spinoff of the University of Michigan started by a professor and his postdoc. At each of the 5 startups I've worked for, I worked with 2-3 founder/cofounders. That's ~12 (I just counted them out) people I've worked with that had founding roles at startups; none of them recurring from previous companies. Not a single one of them fits this inane description you keep using. Am I just extremely lucky, or are you a little bit full of it? |
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My own observations corroborate your data.
I've personally known about a dozen founders who have built a seven or more figure net worth from startups. About ~6 were upper middle class. That is they had parents wealthy enough to pay for a "good" school. But the parents did not have enough money to fund their kids startup or pull on VC connections. Around ~3 people came from well off parents, who might have had enough money for a small trust fund (I do not know whether they actually had a trust fund). One had parents with VC connections. Overall, the career arcs of the well-to-do founders were indistinguishable from the upper middle class kids. The founders from upper class backgrounds were just as smart and hard working as any other founders. The other three founders in my personal dataset were immigrants with very little family support and had to hustle their whole way up.
In my observations, getting VC funding requires at least one of five paths:
a) building a product via bootstrapping and/or seed money, and then either getting significant traction or have a prototype of genuinely novel tech.
b) developing a proven track record as an employee at a company. Maybe you joined a startup early that became big. Maybe you joined a big company and worked your way up to VP of Sales.
c) Having some specialized and valuable knowledge. Maybe you consulted for a particular industry, and thus have inside knowledge about a valuable product that industry could use. Maybe you a professor that just developed some new technology that can be commercialized.
d) going to business school, getting a job as VC associate, and then launching a company with some funding from that firm.
e) having started and exited a previous company
Getting VC funding requires connections. But building these connections is a trivial problem compared to the problem of establishing a track record via either bootstrapping or working your way up at a company. If you cannot establish those connections, you probably do not have the hustle it takes to found a company. If you have VC connections, but no product with traction nor track record of success, then you are not getting funding.
The world michaelochurch describes, "the VC-funded startup CEOs ... I know didn't take any real risk, because they're all trust-fund kids " is a very different world than the one I have experienced.