Kevin Surace breaks down startup survival odds: 1 in 1,000 for friends-and-family funded companies, 1 in 100 for seed-funded ones, 1 in 10 for those with tens of millions in VC. Even with big funding, only 1 in 10 of those succeed. Most founders overestimate their chances.
Before you quit your job to start a company, you need to hear these numbers. No one talks about this. The stats bear this out, right? If you look at the number of companies that start kind of in the friends and family, raise a tiny little bit of money and try, only about 1 out of 1,000 of those ends up successful. And it's 1 out of 100 when you raise some seed capital, and it's 1 out of 10 when you raise tens of millions of dollars of VC capital. And still, it's only 1 out of 10 that makes any real success out of it, right? So those stats are pretty staggering. And everybody, of course, enters in and says, well, I'm not going to be one, I'm going to be the 1 in 1,000, and my chance chances are better. And yes, it's because, you know, there's a bell curve to IQ, and everyone that I've ever met thinks they're on the right side of that bell curve, somewhere between 150 and 200. But it doesn't work that way.
