Beating the odds

March 18, 2024

Peter Walker is the Head of Insights at Carta and he often posts some really interesting data around fundraising, valuations, and more. Last week he happened to share a lookback at the vintage of companies founded in 2018 (the same year we were founded) on Twitter/X and it was a sobering look at the dropoff that happens with each successive round.

In five years, half the companies didn't make it. Only a fraction of the total (57, counting Series A and above) might have had a reasonable exit that generated a return for their investors and team members. Of the companies still ongoing, we are in rarefied air. Just 12.5% of the companies remaining have raised a Series B or more. It's important to recognize that with each passing year, we are beating the odds, those same odds that were stacked against us when we first got started. With each passing year, we have another year of learnings, another year of product development, another year of building our reputation. 

We are here because we have a trait that is almost a requirement for long term success. Resilience is something you need to have and we've shown it time and time again. Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, recently did a talk at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and one of the most talked about segments was where he explained just how much resilience matters in success and how it gets shaped by the setbacks we go through to refine the character of the company.

In startups, it's about demonstrating resilience long enough to win. Of the 3,000+ startups founded in 2018 across all the different sectors, just 381 remain standing. That in and of itself is a lot to be proud of