Internet startups failure rate

Internet Startups: Web 2.0 Success And Failure Rates. VCs: What's Your Failure Rate? This morning, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures discloses to the world his failure rate as a venture capitalist of 17 years (20 percent over 32 investments, which is enviable in VC circles).

He’s also had 11 deals (40 percent) with 5X+ returns, so it more than balances out. Wilson is more at ease talking to the world (through his blog) than most VCs. But all venture capitalists should have to disclose their personal failure rates. After all, measuring performance should go both ways between VCs and entrepreneurs, not to mention venture investors. Six Interesting Stats About Startup Success. Did the paper address how much of point 4 is due to selection and how much is due to ongoing support?

I would expect the more experienced VCs to be better at selecting successes. Hi Dharmesh, Thanks for posting this article, I had a chance to the paper too. And if nothing else, point no.1 is definitely very encouraging for a lot of budding entrepreneurs. Not that we would start to fail, but having failed statistically improves your chances of success, which is GOOD news. SEA - Society for Effectual Action. A detailed review of four literatures, namely, (1) Industrial organization, (2) Population ecology, (3) Labor and micro economics, and (4) Entrepreneurship, suggests that entrepreneurial performance is almost always confounded with firm performance.

Serial entrepreneurial experience is at best seen as one of the inputs into firm performance. In this paper we argue for an instrumental view of the firm by formally showing that entrepreneurs can amplify their expected success rates (as compared to firm success rates) by exploiting contagion processes embedded in serial entrepreneurship. The advantages to holding concurrent portfolios that exploit heterogeneity are well known. The same advantages may be achieved in the serial context through contagion.