Some people doing entrepreneurship to give will invest significant time, energy, and resources into their En2G project, yet fail to generate any meaningful amount of donations. (If this weren’t true, it would signal that the En2G crowd wasn’t taking enough tasks.)
How can the community make this group of people feel validated and esteemed? They did something that was high EV in expectation, rather than take a “safer” but probably lower-EV salary-to-give position which would also have given them assurance of a cushy financial life. I can imagine that people in this position who invested several years in an En2G project might feel their work and sacrifices weren’t appreciated because they didn’t result in actual impact.
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]
Some people doing entrepreneurship to give will invest significant time, energy, and resources into their En2G project, yet fail to generate any meaningful amount of donations. (If this weren’t true, it would signal that the En2G crowd wasn’t taking enough tasks.)
How can the community make this group of people feel validated and esteemed? They did something that was high EV in expectation, rather than take a “safer” but probably lower-EV salary-to-give position which would also have given them assurance of a cushy financial life. I can imagine that people in this position who invested several years in an En2G project might feel their work and sacrifices weren’t appreciated because they didn’t result in actual impact.
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.