Showing posts with label investment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label investment. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Founders, Founders and More Founders

by Darren Herman (4/4/2007)

Paul Graham of Y Combinator success has released an insightful essay about traits he’s studied with the early stage entrepreneurs he deals with each day that are part of his program up in Boston.

The essay didn’t just strike me about founders, but it struck me about Y Combinators success rate as well:

We’ve now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded. Three have been acquired: Reddit was a merger of two, Reddit and Infogami, and a third was acquired that we can’t talk about yet. Another from that batch was Loopt, which is doing so well they could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to.

That’s pretty darn solid if you ask me. I do not know anyone personally who has been through the Y Combinator, but based on the essay that Paul has written and the statistics, the numbers certainly look positive.

In the essay that Paul has written, he talks about many reasons why people do not become entrepreneurial and talks about why those reasons should be ignored. The topics covered are:

  1. Too young
  2. Too inexperienced
  3. Not determined enough
  4. Not smart enough
  5. Know nothing about business
  6. No Cofounder
  7. No idea
  8. No room for more startups
  9. Family to support
  10. Independently wealthy
  11. Not ready for committment
  12. Need for structure
  13. Fear of uncertainty
  14. Don’t realize what you’re avoiding
  15. Parents want you to become a doctor
  16. A job is the default

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