WHAT SETS SUCCESSFUL START-UPS APART?

Episodes 1 Venture team analysed 15,000 early-stage start-ups to determine the optimal profile for fundraising. Here’s what they found:

The name of your company matters. Start-up names less than 6 characters in length were twice as likely to raise as names longer than 15 characters. Although this appears to be more of a correlation than causation, it’s worth considering when naming a company.

Co-founders help massively. Having multiple founders doubles your chances of raising a future Series-A.

Having prior founder experience doubles your chances of raising.

A good school helps, but a great school isn’t necessarily better. Founders attending top-10 universities didn’t have a fundraising advantage over those attending top-100 universities (rankings determined by QS).

Years of experience doesn’t matter. Early-stage founders with less than 5 years of experience were just as likely to raise a Series-A/Series-B as founders with 15-20yrs of experience.

PhDs were twice as likely to raise follow-on rounds.

Speed matters. Businesses raising a seed round within 1yr of incorporation were more than twice as likely to reach the Series-B stage as those that waited 4+ yrs to raise a seed.

Agreeable founders were twice as likely to raise. Neurotic founders were half as likely to raise (we used NLP to infer these traits).