I have no problem with you four.
The founders of startup #2 for me just sold their third company. Both were middle-class Canadians with no "connections", just a solid professional track record. My 2 cofounders at startup #3 were well-off; both were working professionals, like me. Startup #4 was a spinoff of the University of Michigan started by a professor and his postdoc.
At each of the 5 startups I've worked for, I worked with 2-3 founder/cofounders. That's ~12 (I just counted them out) people I've worked with that had founding roles at startups; none of them recurring from previous companies. Not a single one of them fits this inane description you keep using.
Am I just extremely lucky, or are you a little bit full of it?
My own observations corroborate your data.
I've personally known about a dozen founders who have built a seven or more figure net worth from startups. About ~6 were upper middle class. That is they had parents wealthy enough to pay for a "good" school. But the parents did not have enough money to fund their kids startup or pull on VC connections. Around ~3 people came from well off parents, who might have had enough money for a small trust fund (I do not know whether they actually had a trust fund). One had parents with VC connections. Overall, the career arcs of the well-to-do founders were indistinguishable from the upper middle class kids. The founders from upper class backgrounds were just as smart and hard working as any other founders. The other three founders in my personal dataset were immigrants with very little family support and had to hustle their whole way up.
In my observations, getting VC funding requires at least one of five paths:
a) building a product via bootstrapping and/or seed money, and then either getting significant traction or have a prototype of genuinely novel tech.
b) developing a proven track record as an employee at a company. Maybe you joined a startup early that became big. Maybe you joined a big company and worked your way up to VP of Sales.
c) Having some specialized and valuable knowledge. Maybe you consulted for a particular industry, and thus have inside knowledge about a valuable product that industry could use. Maybe you a professor that just developed some new technology that can be commercialized.
d) going to business school, getting a job as VC associate, and then launching a company with some funding from that firm.
e) having started and exited a previous company
Getting VC funding requires connections. But building these connections is a trivial problem compared to the problem of establishing a track record via either bootstrapping or working your way up at a company. If you cannot establish those connections, you probably do not have the hustle it takes to found a company. If you have VC connections, but no product with traction nor track record of success, then you are not getting funding.
The world michaelochurch describes, "the VC-funded startup CEOs ... I know didn't take any real risk, because they're all trust-fund kids " is a very different world than the one I have experienced.
Please don't take this the wrong way: Your comments seem to reflect your own track record of professional failure rather than some legitimate trends or observations about the industry as a whole.
If every founder, investor, executive you have met has seemed malicious or incompetent, please consider this: the only common denominator is you.
You know nothing about about me, what I have seen, or where I have been. It's true that I've picked some terrible startups, but hundreds of people have had similar experiences to corroborate. If I were the only one who held these opinions or had that category of experience, I'd think differently about the whole thing.
I'm pretty good at picking out genuine problems (i.e. the persistent low status, mistreatment, and mediocre compensation of software engineers in this industry) from noise (transient bad luck that happens to all of us).
If every founder, investor, executive you have met has seemed malicious or incompetent, please consider this: the only common denominator is you.
That is far from what I said. Not even close. Not every one is bad. However, I do think that the social class distance between VCs and petitioners is vast and is already at, if not beyond, the point of being the most important factor in the interaction.
This game has already been worked out, and we should leave it to the people who won it and go build something new. They don't have much without us, so what are we waiting for?
I was born into a poor family, with no connections to speak of. I simply did not know anyone who was wealthy or successful when I was a kid. I've made a comfortable middle-class life for myself through lots of hard work. Starting a software company is something I'm doing because I see a valuable problem to solve, and something I believe I can do because I'm smart and determined - not because I was born into privilege.
