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Are "already successful" more or less likely to hit home runs? I don't know the answer. Netflix, redfin, and twitter are 2nd acts by "already successful" folk

by anamax 15y ago

Are "already successful" more or less likely to hit home runs? I don't know the answer. Netflix, redfin, and twitter are 2nd acts by "already successful" folk. Yahoo, HP, Amazon, Google, Disney, Apple, Cisco are by first-timers. (Disney had several failures under his belt.) I don't know about Walmart. Sam Walton had been a regional manager for another chain but I don't know for sure that he hadn't been a "successful entrepreneur".

diego 15y ago
That's survivor bias. The set of already successful entrepreneurs is much smaller than the set of first-time entrepreneurs. To answer your question you want the distribution of outcomes for both sets. VCs have to have good estimates of that data.