Founders - it's okay to wander.
Sometimes startups fly through funding rounds and sometimes they get stuck (or have trouble getting started).
Sometimes those periods look like failure from the outside, but what's happening inside the company is actually setting up the startup for long-term success.
Startups are a power law business, sure, but they are also a long-tail one.
You can see this clearly in the chart below. The median age of a startup raising a priced seed round this year was 1.2 years. But there were startups founded in 2017 that got funded as well.
Some of the middle venture rounds are even more distributed. 4% of companies that raised a Series B in 2024 were founded in 2015 and 4% in 2023.
I will say - some of the incentives in venture make speed an important element. Not only does it signal a potential winner, increasing valuation in rapid fashion does wonders for a VC funds performance numbers. Is that always indicative of ultimate success? No. But incentives in the meantime are still powerful.
No one right path!
#startups #fundraising #venturecapital #founders
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