Well known brands on a founder’s CV matter less than having real startup experience

Ask most investors what makes a founder investable, and you’ll get some version of the same list: a strong university, a stint at a famous tech company, maybe a previous exit. Google or Revolut on the CV does more for a founder’s credibility in a first meeting than almost anything else they could put there. We think the industry has been reading the CV wrong.

Over the past decade, my colleagues and I have backed roughly 2,000 start-ups from inception. At that stage, the thing we lean on most is whether we believe in the founder. And after 2,000 investments you learn a lot about what it really takes to be a great founder.  We conducted research to see if we could quantify a thesis we have long held – that nothing beats the training of working at a scrappy start-up if you want to become a founder.  We analysed 51,722 European startups and their fundraising activity to try and understand if where you worked before founding actually predicts whether your own company goes on to raise a Series A. 

The Google effect is real, but smaller than everyone thinks
Across our sample, founders whose prior employer was Google, Meta, Amazon or a similar Big Tech name converted to Series A at 33% – a solid improvement on the European baseline of 23%, but nothing remarkable. In fact, it’s statistically identical to the conversion rate for founders who’d worked at any seed-stage startup, famous or not.

Compare that to founders whose previous employer was itself a startup that had gone on to raise a Series A, B or C during their time there. Those founders converted at 44.5% – nearly double the baseline, and more than 10 percentage points ahead of the Big Tech cohort. No other background variable we tested came close, including elite education, prior exits, or technical degrees. In other words, a few years spent inside a company as it fought its way from seed to Series B teaches a founder more about building a company than a few years spent inside a company that finished that fight over a decade ago. 

Big Tech is an extraordinary place to learn how to run a mature organisation. It is a poor place to learn what it feels like to be six months from running out of cash, or to make a hiring decision that will define your culture for the next three years. Those are precisely the muscles a founder needs on day one.

It’s not the logo. It’s whether you stuck around for the hard part
The more interesting layer of the data is about timing, not just company choice. When we looked at exactly when founders joined and left their previous employer, a sharper pattern emerged: it isn’t just early exposure to a startup that matters, it’s whether you were still there when things got difficult.

Founders who joined an early-stage company and left before it hit meaningful growth – before a Series A, before the real scaling pressure arrived – converted at just 33.7%. Founders who joined at a similar early stage but stayed through their employer reaching Series A or beyond converted at 55.3%, more than double the baseline. Tenure through the hard part of scaling, not proximity to a promising name, is what matters. Some of this is surely selection rather than pure cause: the people who stay through the grind may already be the more driven and capable ones, and those same traits are what make them investable founders later. But whether the experience builds the muscle or simply reveals it, it is a signal worth weighting. 

That is a genuinely uncomfortable finding for an industry that likes to pattern-match on brand names, because it means the more obvious signal – “they worked at Google” – is the less useful one. The founder who spent four years as employee fifty at a Series B logistics company nobody outside the industry has heard of has, on this data, a better track record than the one with eighteen months at a household name.

The most productive “founder factories” are not the ones you’d guess
We also tried to identify which specific companies had produced the highest hit-rate of founders – not the most founders, but the highest proportion who went on to actually raise a Series A themselves.  The results, again, are surprising. Names like LiveRamp, Improbable and Withings sit at the top of the list, alongside Klarna and Atlassian – companies that were genuinely mid-scale when their alumni worked there, rather than already-arrived giants. Zynga, the video game developer, stands out on a different measure – not hit-rate but sheer volume – as the single biggest factory in the dataset: over a hundred alumni founders in our sample, with a hit rate well above the European baseline.

None of these are the companies that dominate a ‘top pedigree’ slide in a pitch deck. But all of them put people through the specific, gruelling experience of scaling a company through institutional funding rounds – and that experience appears to travel with them.

What this means for investors and founders
For investors, the implication is that some of the most promising founders in front of you right now don’t look promising by the usual heuristics. They didn’t intern at a unicorn. They spent three or four years in the operational trenches of a company you’ve never heard of, watching it lurch from seed to Series B, doing whatever needed doing along the way. That is worth as much screening attention as a Big Tech logo, arguably more.

For founders, and for anyone advising them, it’s a genuinely useful piece of career information: if you want to maximise your own odds of building something that raises institutional capital, the evidence suggests that a growth-stage startup – one actively fighting its way through Series A, B and C – will teach you more than a comfortable seat at a company that has already made it.

There’s also a wider point here for the UK and Europe specifically. The received wisdom has always been that European founders start at a disadvantage because the region doesn’t have the density of Big Tech alumni that Silicon Valley does. This data suggests that assumption is simply wrong. If growth-stage scaling experience is the real predictor – not Big Tech pedigree – then Europe, with its own fast-growing generation of Series A, B and C companies, already has exactly the raw material it needs. 

The task is not to import more famous names. It’s to get better at recognising the founders who’ve quietly done the hard part already.