The Y Combinator 0.8%: From Founder to Leader
These stats are fascinating. YC is a premier, highly selective incubator. It screens and accepts only the top ideas, founders, and teams.
The stats highlight that “only” 0.4% of those go on to IPO. 0.8% are valued over $150M. These are among the strongest stats in their market. And yet, it falls shy of what we would expect from a community of the most promising ideas and founders. No founder starts out with the intent of being part of the 99.2%!
We don’t believe “the 0.8%” got there simply because of superior ideas and founding teams. Rather, a differentiator for those teams was an ability to consistently execute and deliver due to strong leadership and management, and a clear culture that promotes consistent learning.
The role specs “from founder to CEO” are different, and a very high percentage are unprepared for the context shift from a start-up to product-market fit, growth stage company. Founders are often experts in their respective fields, but they and their teams are often not well equipped to build an organization that can sustainably scale execution.
Along the way, productivity drops and results are increasingly and avoidably left off the table. Brilliant ideas that have the potential to shape a market, drive value, and join the rarefied 0.8% simply don’t. We’ll never know “what could have been”. Most importantly, the founders won’t either.
And that is where LionPoint can really help. It’s our mission to support leaders driving systemic, market level change in high growth orgs. Helping our early stage clients make the shift from “founder to leader” in the midst of rapid change, and doing so with a careful eye on identifying the context that allows them to be their own best version of a CEO and push towards “the 0.8%”.