My experience is that there are a bunch of metrics about startups which correlate with the founders’ skill/effort better (though not perfectly) than exit value:
Peak revenue run rate (and related metrics like EBITDA)
Prestigiousness of investors
Prestigious of incubator
Amount of money raised
Number of employees
And most of these metrics are publicly available.
I actually don’t know a ton of people who are in the category of “founded something that was ex-ante plausible, put multiple years into it, but it didn’t work out” so I’m mostly speculating, but my somewhat limited experience is that people will usually put on their resume stuff like “founded and grew my start up to $10M/year ARR with 30 employees backed by Sequoia” and this is impressive despite them not exiting successfully.[1]
My experience is that there are a bunch of metrics about startups which correlate with the founders’ skill/effort better (though not perfectly) than exit value:
Peak revenue run rate (and related metrics like EBITDA)
Prestigiousness of investors
Prestigious of incubator
Amount of money raised
Number of employees
And most of these metrics are publicly available.
I actually don’t know a ton of people who are in the category of “founded something that was ex-ante plausible, put multiple years into it, but it didn’t work out” so I’m mostly speculating, but my somewhat limited experience is that people will usually put on their resume stuff like “founded and grew my start up to $10M/year ARR with 30 employees backed by Sequoia” and this is impressive despite them not exiting successfully.[1]
Though obviously ~100% of these founders would happily exchange that line on their resume for a fat check from having sold their company.