📊 We studied 9 LinkedIn profile traits across 783 founder profiles - a mix of high momentum, exited, and failed ventures. The strongest signal of startup success? Not an MBA. Not a top 50 school. It was technical education. At FoundersEdge, Gregory Raiz and I partnered with Qiuyan Xu at Gravitate AI to analyze the LinkedIn profiles of 783 founders and test 9 popular traits we hear frequently referenced by investors. Our goal? Go beyond stereotypes and gut feel, and use real data to understand what actually correlates with CEO founder success. Was our study perfect? No. But we found valuable takeaways and I'm excited to share them with you in the coming weeks! Here’s how we grouped the CEO founders: 🟥 Low Momentum Founders: Raised $100K or less 2019-2023 and have not raised since, most now shut down. 📈 High Momentum Founders: Company founded during/after 2019, went from a $500k–$5M first raise to at least one subsequent raise that was >$2M more than the first, indicating real traction and momentum. ✅ Exited Founders: Acquired or IPO’d since 2019 with last known valuation of >$30M, most much higher. Highlighting one of our most surprising and valuable takeaways... Only 12.8% of Low Momentum Founder CEOs had a technical education (computer science / ML / engineering degree). That jumps to 26.6% in High Momentum Founder CEOs. And 33.3% in Exited Founder CEOs. That’s a 2.5x signal. Technical chops alone don’t guarantee success, but this data suggests they may matter more than having a business related degree and any of the other factors we analyzed. In the coming weeks, we’ll share more findings from this study - including the 8 other founder traits we tested. 👉 Follow me to get the rest of the series! #datadriven #vc #foundertraits #technicaldegree #ai
Fascinating findings, Jess. Would love to see how technical education correlates with specific industry verticals. Does this pattern hold across all sectors equally?
Thrilled to partner with you and Gregory Raiz on this analysis! 🚀 What stood out to me is how the data cuts through common stereotypes we hear from investors. While technical education emerged as a strong signal, it’s really about how founders combine that foundation with execution, resilience, and market insight. Excited to share more of the findings with the community in the coming weeks!
Across all of our traits there are always people who have different individual experiences, and I've certainly backed a number of non-technical founders but leaning into data we believe we can help de-bias early stage investing and give founders the edge.
Gregory Raiz and Jess Lynch This is great work and proud to be a founding LP in FoundersEdge where filtering is based on data and not just gut feel. Am curious, have we looked at multi founder startups e.g. the classic Hacker(tech), Hustler(sales), Hipster(prod)? E.g. results based on who was in what title vs background, 2 founder vs 3 founders, how the founders started out etc.? Might be interesting!