My experience is that there are a bunch of metrics about startups which correlate with the foundersâ skill/âeffort 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 donât know a ton of people who are in the category of âfounded something that was ex-ante plausible, put multiple years into it, but it didnât work outâ so Iâm mostly speculating, but my somewhat limited experience is that people will usually put on their resume stuff like âfounded and grew my start up to $10M/âyear ARR with 30 employees backed by Sequoiaâ 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 foundersâ skill/âeffort 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 donât know a ton of people who are in the category of âfounded something that was ex-ante plausible, put multiple years into it, but it didnât work outâ so Iâm mostly speculating, but my somewhat limited experience is that people will usually put on their resume stuff like âfounded and grew my start up to $10M/âyear ARR with 30 employees backed by Sequoiaâ 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.