1. What we’ve learned from
10 years and over 300 investments.
10years.firstround.com© 2015 First Round Capital

2. We believe that seed investing is much more an art
than a science — and there’s no such thing as a
formula for success.
But as First Round celebrates our 10-year anniversary
this year, we thought it could be interesting to
publicly share some insights.
We have a unique data set of detailed information on
our community of over 300 companies — and nearly
600 founders. We wanted to look at the founder
characteristics that accompanied successes and not
quite successes.
Of course there were counterexamples and outliers,
but some definite themes emerged.
Here are 10 of them.
10years.firstround.com© 2015 First Round Capital

3. 10years.firstround.com
Women
are Winning
Companies with a female founder
performed 63% better than our
investments with all-male founding
teams.
F I N D I N G # 1
+63%

4. 10years.firstround.com
Startup Fortune
Favors the
Young
The average age of a First Round
founder is 32. But teams with an
average founder age of under 25
(when we invested) perform nearly
30% above our average.
+30%AVG.
F I N D I N G # 2

5. 10years.firstround.com
Where You Went
to School
Matters
First Round companies with at least
one founder who attended an Ivy
League school, Stanford, MIT or
Caltech performed 220% better
than other teams.
F I N D I N G # 3
HARVARD
COLUMBIA PENN
CORNELL
+220%

6. 10years.firstround.com
The Halo
Effect of Former
Employers is Real
Founding teams with experience at
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google,
Microsoft or Twitter built companies
that performed 160% better than
others in the First Round community.
F I N D I N G # 4
+160%
Performance
Valuations
+50%

7. 10years.firstround.com
Investors Pay
More for Repeat
Founders
Our investments in repeat founders
didn't perform significantly better
than our investments in first-timers —
because their initial valuations
tended to be 50% higher.
F I N D I N G # 5
Valuations
+50%

8. 10years.firstround.com
Solo Founders
do Much Worse
than Teams
Teams with more than one founder
outperformed solo founders by a
whopping 163% and solo founders'
seed valuations were 25% less than
our teams with more than one
founder.
F I N D I N G # 6
+163%
Valuations
Performance
+25%

9. 10years.firstround.com
First Round enterprise companies with at
least one technical founder perform a full
230% better than their non-technical
colleagues. But consumer companies with
at least one technical co-founder
underperform completely non-technical
teams by 31%.
-31%
+230%
Performance
Technical Co-
Founders
are Critical in
Enterprise
Not So Much In Consumer
F I N D I N G # 7

10. 10years.firstround.com
You Can
Succeed Outside
Big Tech Hubs
First Round companies founded
outside New York and the Bay Area
are performing just as well as their
peers based in those epicenters — in
fact, they do 1.3% better.
F I N D I N G # 8
+1.3%
Better between

11. 10years.firstround.com
The Next
Big Thing Can Come
from Anywhere
Companies that we discovered through
Twitter, Demo Day, etc. outperformed
referred companies by 58.4%.
Founders that came directly to us with
their ideas did about 23% better.
F I N D I N G # 9
Josh, you have to see this
Hey, Look at my idea!
Brand new idea!
+23%
+58%

12. 10years.firstround.com
The Action is
Moving from Sand
Hill to San Francisco
Before 2009, we invested nearly
equally between San Francisco and
the rest of the Bay Area. During the
last five years, 75% of our Northern
California companies started their
companies in the city.
F I N D I N G # 1 0
Sand Hill
San Francisco

13. It’s amazing what a decade’s worth of data
can show. While these findings won’t
dictate how we choose to invest from now
on, we’re intrigued by what they say about
the shifting direction of our industry.
A R TS C I E N C E
10years.firstround.com© 2015 First Round Capital

14. We’re already looking forward
to the 20 Year Project.
10years.firstround.com© 2015 First Round Capital

15. A Note on Our Methodology
Performance multiples reflect the appreciation (or
depreciation) between our original investment
and (1) the value at exit (for companies that have
exited) or (2) the fair market value we used in our
audited December 31, 2014 financial statements.
While we’ve invested in 300+ companies to date,
we did not include investments in (1) the 16
companies that we backed in the last six months
(since their share value wasn’t included in our
2014 financials), (2) the 17 companies that we
invested in 2014 that did not raise follow-on
financing by the end of 2014 (since their share
value would not have time to change either up or
down) and (3) our investment in Uber (as it would
skew all the results, showing that companies with
a name that starts with a vowel, for example,
perform 100x better than all other investments).
To be clear, we’re not expecting this analysis to
get us an invitation to join the American Statistical
Association. And we’re not claiming that our data
is representative of the industry… or even
statistically significant. Rather, we believe that this
data can provide some interesting directional
insight. We found some of the learnings to be
surprising — and I’m sure we’ll continue to be
surprised many more times over the next 10 years.
10years.firstround.com© 2015 First Round Capital

16. F I R ST R O U N D.CO M
Find out how you can join
the First Round Community:
10years.firstround.com© 2015 First Round Capital