But the opposite is also happening; entrepreneurial minds who have built businesses at established companies or on their own are also choosing a path to become creators themselves.

As a seed-stage investor at First Round Capital, I get to meet a lot of founders who are exploring and validating their ideas. It’s an exciting time for them and, as a former founder myself, I relate to the thrill and anxiety of just getting started. You believe you’re onto something and feel ready to bring your idea to life, but there’s also a lot... See more

Livingston: What would you tell someone who wanted to start their own company? van Hoff: If you have the energy to do it, then you should try it yourself. But you do need to have the ability to form a team around you with good people. Talent attracts talent. A lot of people get stuck on the idea. They all want to invent something and go execute on

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In venture capital, many of the pitches we see are from first-time founders. It’s less common to hear from founders who have successfully sold a company before. But when I looked at the billion-dollar companies in my study, I unearthed a compelling pattern. Almost 60 percent of those founders had previous experience as startup founders. Not as earl

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I call this the “top-down” model of thinking. The entrepreneurs picked a market, a customer type, or a trend and then hunted for problems to be solved. These aren’t the typical stories one hears about how billion-dollar companies are formed. That sort of origin story isn’t quite as exciting as the one we’re more likely to encounter, about the found

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the stereotypes about an “ideal” team—where one founder must be from the industry and the other co-founder must be a tech-savvy innovator—are not necessarily correct. More than domain expertise, what mattered was having work experience at all. It’s the soft skills like managing a team, hiring and firing, raising money, and working the Rolodex of co

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