Every investor says theyâre looking for outlier founders, until one actually cold emails them a deck. An entrepreneur with zero founder-market fit, who wasnât employee number 8 at Google, no Stanford PhD and no previous time at a unicorn. Someone who doesnât hit any of the buzzwords on the VC Bingo scorecard. But when we analysed 16,000 seed founders, we saw that the tickboxes many VCs use today to evaluate founders had minimal correlation with huge future outcomes.
Only 15% of unicorns went through an accelerator programme. Less than 10% had previously worked for another unicorn prior to founding their company. The average CEO age at founding for a unicorn was ~40. Only 10% had worked at a unicorn before founding their own. 40% were first time founders. And yet these were the people who built the most valuable companies on the planet. The CV signal did help your Series-A conversion rate, but quickly lost steam beyond the first 2yrs.
What was actually predictive was prior startup exposure (didnât have to be founder role) and having built something before, regardless of whether it was successful or not. Seeing and learning from catastrophic failure up close was critical. The Cambrian explosion in AI is leading to obsession with âsexy CVâ pattern matching, but history shows us that if the rĂŠsumĂŠ looks like a slam dunk, itâs probably not the signal youâre looking for. Most of the best bets walk in on Day 1 looking like an obvious pass.