As Sam Altman says, “The most important thing you can get to be a founder is to pick your parents well. That’s a really sad statement about the world.”
A lot of what makes a founder is set before they’re old enough to drop out of college. It starts with nutrition and security and, as much as possible, love. And then it’s just money. Were you sent to a good school? Were there books around the house, a computer you could take apart and break?
Then it gets down to brass tacks. Can you get grandfathered into an elite school, or pay for the extra-curriculars to get in? Can your parents loan you that first $30,000 to get started or, like Jeff Bezos, that first $250,000? Can you afford to fail, over and over again? It gets down to money.
If you’re looking at what makes an entrepreneur with a hard, data-driven eye what you’ll see is that three traits are correlated more than any other. Wealth, gender and race.
Perseverance, grit, and intelligence all matter, but statistically these are all marginal gains. They’re barely measurable. What is measurable is that 80% of businesses start with personal or family money. Only 18% of businesses ever access a bank loan, and those are often secured by personal or…
