Jason M. Lemkin discusses why most startup math is wrong. Out of 1,000 startups, he explains how many actually reach $100M in revenue as independent companies, drawing on his investing experience with successful exits.
I'm interested in what the odds of success are. So if there's a thousand startups, everyone.
Gets this math wrong. It's stupid math. There's a thousand startups.
In your experience, how many of them will will hit 100 million in revenue as a freestanding company?
How many of them have great founders and have great initial traction?
So in your experience of a thousand startups, how many have.
Let me give, let me give you a fun example. So when I started invest, I've been investing for about 10 years and said I've only done like 30 investment. Pipedrive sold for 1.5 billion now doing almost 200 million in revenue. Okay. Second one, Algolia, worth 3 billion, doing over 200 million, will IPO next year. That's the second one I invested at $8,000 a month in revenue. Third one is Talk desk. They're worth 10 billion. They're doing hundreds of millions of revenue. They will IPO. Yesterday I invested when it was five people and one person in the United States who didn't even have a desk.
