[michaelochurch]

Ignoring the already-discussed issue of overfitting, I'm going to discuss something that surprises many, but shouldn't.

Using this process, he discovered some surprising things—most notably that a company’s team is only about 12 percent predictive of a company’s success.

I'm surprised that it's even that high. In the real world (e.g. outside of the VC-funded world) the team is important, because they're going to grow the company from scratch, and that requires getting more things right than wrong over 5+ years. On the other hand, if you're Snapchat, you have several investor-level people working to protect the company from its founder-quality problems and its own worst impulses, and the company will IPO or be bought before its cultural rot reaches a critical point.

The Valley's founder-quality problem creates a lot of awful corporate cultures, and it has dragged the status of engineers way down, and it's generally been bad for the world... but it doesn't kill businesses because the investors are able to keep enough of them on track to produce successes. The influence of VC "rocket fuel" and guidance is why a company can have terrible founders and still succeed.

[mojuba]

There is a factor at play here, I think, and it's the age. Many investors are simply older and are more experienced individuals. I'm not even sure if their VC status matters here any more than their age.

(In a rather comical example, two youngsters want to put together another chat app with cool new smiley icons, then two VCs step in and ask: how are you going to monetize on smileys?)

Investors should definitely be viewed as part of the team - one, and two, age should also be taken into account. I wonder if Growth Science considers this as well.