Comments on The Rational Entrepreneur: Puzzle: Failing as a Founder Seems to Teach Surpri...

Maybe failing as a founder teaches less than being...

2010-02-27T22:34:29.502-08:00

Maybe failing as a founder teaches less than being part of a successful company because there are many ways to fail and only a few to succeed. If your experiences all involve failure, you might not necessarily know what you need to change to become successful. If your experiences all involve success, then you can just reuse what you experienced and likely have a success yourself.

@Jonathan Your model seems consistent with the Gom...

2009-11-25T18:02:33.835-08:00

@Jonathan Your model seems consistent with the Gompers paper mentioned. However, the Baptista (Portugal) paper mentioned includes non-VC firms and shows experience as an employee being more useful than experience as a founder, even though both groups presumably have to deal with investor constraints. Still, you may be onto something here.

Rolf, great post! However, after reading the sour...

2009-11-25T12:39:56.546-08:00

Rolf, great post! However, after reading the source article, I have to challenge your conclusion..

The reason? The data only takes into consideration venture-backed companies which only applies to a small percentage of entrepreneurs.

First, almost by definition, VC's want to invest in entrepreneurs who have to learn very little in order to make a particular venture succeed - the entrepreneur's background and experiences should already be aligned with the actions it takes to make a venture succeed.

Second, many venture funded entrepreneurs I have met will already have a track record of success or failure even before being venture funded. The data source does not account at all for serial entrepreneurs who have learned their way into the experience set required for a VC to invest in them.

Lastly, many VC backed business models simply have different challenges and different success metrics than non venture-backed businesses. It is frequent that the founder of a venture-backed company simply does not have the authority to execute based on their own intentions and experience - they must work within the constraints of their investors who may have different goals.

@Arun insightful question. Overall is about 5%, bu...

2009-11-25T11:22:14.690-08:00

@Arun insightful question. Overall is about 5%, but successful-only isn't broken out. I'm curious too, I'll email the authors.

I'd be interested to know, out of the 'one set of ...

2009-11-25T00:17:13.766-08:00

I'd be interested to know, out of the 'one set of numbers,' how many of the first time successful entrepreneurs were second time entrepreneurs?

guess depends on person to person. some people wil...

2009-11-24T21:49:25.273-08:00

guess depends on person to person. some people will evolve more in different places