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A comment on “Entrepreneurs get distracted by fundraising, so I just did that part first.”. Parent comment

Re:“Entrepreneurs get distracted by fundraising, so I just d... by anamax on Friday December 16, 2011 @10:26AM (#3360936)
Are "already successful" more or less likely to hit home runs?

I don't know the answer.

Netflix, redfin, and twitter are 2nd acts by "already successful" folk. Yahoo, HP, Amazon, Google, Disney, Apple, Cisco are by first-timers. (Disney had several failures under his belt.)

I don't know about Walmart. Sam Walton had been a regional manager for another chain but I don't know for sure that he hadn't been a "successful entrepreneur".

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Re:“Entrepreneurs get distracted by fundraising, so I just d... by diego on Friday December 16, 2011 @10:29AM (#3360945)
That's survivor bias. The set of already successful entrepreneurs is much smaller than the set of first-time entrepreneurs.

To answer your question you want the distribution of outcomes for both sets. VCs have to have good estimates of that data.

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