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The Startup Founder Wealth Survey
- keraz 11y agoThis is rad. Can't wait to see the results.
- mattzito 11y agoIt seems really surprising that you're not tracking location, as that might dramatically skew your distribution.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jamescrowley 11y agoMight also want to specify if you want the numbers in USD or local currency
- tshakur 11y agoAlso good catch.
- tshakur 11y agoGreat catch. Added.
- ebahnx 11y agoReally simple survey idea, I'm surprised no one has done this in a while.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eldavido 11y agoI'd be more interested in something representative of a broader sample than just those who've "made it". The interview in the article advises "Bet on yourself instead of saving in retirement accounts", I wonder how that would change if she hadn't had a 7-figure exit? OTOH maybe you just need to be so self-assured to the point of being delusional to succeed at this game. ;) But tautologically, not everyone can be "above average".
- narrator 11y agoI like the "bet on yourself" advice that the one F/29 founder gives.
- nabaraz 11y ago| Bet on yourself instead of saving in retirement accounts. You will make more money in the future, so instead of putting $100 a week in your retirement account, spend it on books or working your side project. I cant stress how true it is.
- icedchai 11y agoYou should do both and hedge your bets.
- powera 11y ago"Don't save for retirement" is much better advice when you know you're going to make $10 million before you turn 30.
- VikingCoder 11y agoRight, unless you get hit by a truck.
- wdewind 11y agoThis type of data is subject to so many biases there is no way to make it useful (in fact I'd argue that it is actually worse than useless, it's misleading and incorrect). I'd love to be corrected on this, so if you have ideas for gathering this kind of data in a useful/non-biased way I'd love to hear it.
- tshakur 11y agoWe'd love to hear your opinion as well. How do you think we can do it?
- rbobby 11y agoDoesn't ask about debt... which is a bit odd.
- tshakur 11y agoadded!
- riebschlager 11y agoIf you think this is a legit scientific survey, I have a Google form where I am taking a survey of founders' bank account and routing numbers.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tshakur 11y agoRelax. No one thinks this is a legit scientific survey. It's just for fun.
- 2close4comfort 11y agoPlus, could you add your address and when you next plan on being on vacation that would be extremely helpful. And your mother's maiden name, your 1st pet's name, your elementary school's name, and your nickname in school. This last one is just for fun really.
- optimusclimb 11y agoWoah what am I doing wrong? Incoming 5 years ago (at age 24) was 45k a year, and at 29: $330k liquid split over checking and savings. 400k in "retirement accounts" - bearing in mind that 18k (current max 401k contribution in 2015, so this would be higher than years ago) times 8 years (assuming starting work at age 21) would be ~144K in contributions, so pretty damned good returns there... then on top of that 8.4 Million in illiquid assets? I seriously feel sometimes that there's things that have gone WAY over my head despite living around here for 8+ years and working in tech.
- powera 11y agoYou clearly didn't start a company with a $15 million exit. I'm sure all the advice/numbers here will have a MASSIVE MASSIVE amount of selection bias and probably don't apply unless you're guaranteed to be making millions.
- tshakur 11y agoWe want the one person company all the way to the 1000 person company to fill out the info. Please, we'd love to here your story, regardless if it was a hit or not...just as long as you were or are doing it fulltime.
- zrail 11y agoIf you own a business with no employees (therefore not beholden to the safe harbor rules) your 401k contributions can be up to $53k (for 2015), including the $18k personal contribution and an additional $35k of profit sharing. These numbers are scaled up each year, but I can absolutely see $400k spread across 401(k) and IRAs for a successful business owner.
- Abundnce10 11y agoAny other perks like this (business owner with no employees) I can take advantage of?
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- rachellaw 11y agoI'm assuming that the founders they're looking for are already on a Series A or have a nice cushion of savings or positive cashflow? I'm making 5x lower than I previously did (thanks for reminding me!) after bootstrapping through all my savings and such. TBH it seems like they're doing a survey to confirm a story they've already written on founder successes. That's a good, rags-to-riches story but the hard numbers is that 80% of startups will fail within 3 years and those founders will be financially burned.
- tshakur 11y agoNo no - we have zero assumptions. We want anyone who's making a living as a founder. You can be a one man operation, 500+ employees, or anything in between.
- tshakur 11y agoWe'd love for you to fill out the survey, and please put in the comment boxes what your situation is. This isn't just for the big series A people. In fact, it's to show that everyone is different.
- huhtenberg 11y agoNo way in hell this is going to be representative, of anything at all. Well-off people who feel like bragging about their wealth are not representative of the group as a whole, nor would you know what fraction of the group they comprise. The same goes for not-so-well-off people who feel like sharing. Then there will also be posers and fakes. You just cannot extract anything meaningful from a sample of 100 of this sort of data.
- tshakur 11y agoWe've actually had way more than 100 responses so far and it's growing. Would love you to submit your info!
- brianwawok 11y agoIf you have bad data, it doesn't really matter if you have 1 data point or 1 million data points - its still bad data.
- rdl 11y agoThis is a great idea for a research topic, but badly executed, which is sad, because it will produce garbage data in an important area.
- tshakur 11y agoHow would you make it better?
- nostrademons 11y agoLook up "voluntary response bias" in any statistics tutorial. The general lesson you'll learn: "voluntary response data is meaningless". To draw any sort of valid conclusion, you really need random sampling. If you can't get random sampling (which is often hard when you're looking at something personally sensitive like income or net worth), the best you can do is to select your population through some means presumably uncorrelated with the quantities you're trying to measure, and then randomly sample within that. For example, if you were a bank or other financial institution, you'd have data on everyone's net worth, and you could randomly sample within the population of business owners there to draw useful statistics. There's still some sample bias (eg. perhaps the demographics of "your account holders" don't match the demographics of "all business owners"), but at least you won't get increased response rates from people with extreme values. This, incidentally, is why major consumer Internet properties like Google and Facebook are so valuable. They have data on a large swath of humanity, selected because they own a service that virtually everyone finds helpful, and so they can run experiments within that population to draw useful conclusions about human nature.
- rdl 11y agoThe only cheap/practical way to do this is to sample a subgroup chosen because they can be measured. Say, YC S13 founders today, or Stanford alumns in a specific group on campus (START?) 5 years later who are in close communication. The group will not be representative of the total population of entrepreneurs/founders, but the group will give internally high response rate and thus significance for that group. And an ACCURATE survey of Stanford alum founders will actually be more representative of overall founders than a voluntary-response set would be. You then ALSO ask better questions. That's also bad in this survey, but not the worst part -- the voluntary response bias is. (I want to be positive overall, though -- it is awesome that you are surveying this. I just want you to do the best job possible.)
- kdamken 11y agoReally looking forward to seeing the results. Still, what a redonkulous amount of money. Must be nice to sell a business and then move right into a comfy $250k a year job.
- fahim305 11y agogreat idea @ the hustle. now share the data with me so I feel like crap about how relatively poor I am :-D
- andy_ppp 11y agoWe might as well say "So I created this random number generator and seeded from the Internet and allowed people to comment on the random numbers they put in! We even gave an incredibly high example that honestly won't skew the results at all." When I read the example I immediately thought, man, I need to move to the bay area... Until I realised it was made up.
- NDizzle 11y agoMy entry would be awesome. $3.46 here, $822.12 there... You get the picture.
- codeonfire 11y agoWho is stupid enough to give away all their financial information into a random web form for nothing.
- tshakur 11y agoWas this post deleted?