Apparently a heuristic funders use, is that the best startup founders are those that have done the most startups in the past, irrespective of if they failed or succeeded.
If this is mapping reality well, it might be because most startups fail. So even a person that is very competent at running a startup is expected to fail a couple of times. And having run multiple startups either indicates that certain skills have been acquired, or that the person has some desirable attributes:
Determination is important, so people who give up after failing will be filtered.
If somebody convinced other grantmakers in the past, that is an indicator that they are intelligent enough to generate a coherent-looking proposal.
They will have gathered a lot of experience running companies, which seems to be an important skill that I would expect is hard to impossible to get in other ways, to the same extent.
Apparently a heuristic funders use, is that the best startup founders are those that have done the most startups in the past, irrespective of if they failed or succeeded.
If this is mapping reality well, it might be because most startups fail. So even a person that is very competent at running a startup is expected to fail a couple of times. And having run multiple startups either indicates that certain skills have been acquired, or that the person has some desirable attributes:
Determination is important, so people who give up after failing will be filtered.
If somebody convinced other grantmakers in the past, that is an indicator that they are intelligent enough to generate a coherent-looking proposal.
They will have gathered a lot of experience running companies, which seems to be an important skill that I would expect is hard to impossible to get in other ways, to the same extent.