
The Startup Founder Wealth Survey - tshakur
https://docs.google.com/a/hustlecon.com/forms/d/1g1-TOwUraKggXwCo0SzLrNa0dM4g_dNGUXilR3TMqUQ/viewform
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riebschlager
If you think this is a legit scientific survey, I have a Google form where I
am taking a survey of founders' bank account and routing numbers.

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tshakur
Relax. No one thinks this is a legit scientific survey. It's just for fun.

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kzhahou
Ha. There's something about asking founders how much money they've made that
makes people particularly uncomfortable.

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tshakur
Exactly, which is why it's so fun!

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huhtenberg
No way in hell this is going to be representative, of anything at all.

Well-off people who feel like bragging about their wealth are not
representative of the group as a whole, nor would you know what fraction of
the group they comprise. The same goes for not-so-well-off people who feel
like sharing. Then there will also be posers and fakes. You just cannot
extract anything meaningful from a sample of 100 of this sort of data.

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tshakur
We've actually had way more than 100 responses so far and it's growing. Would
love you to submit your info!

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brianwawok
If you have bad data, it doesn't really matter if you have 1 data point or 1
million data points - its still bad data.

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mattzito
It seems really surprising that you're not tracking location, as that might
dramatically skew your distribution.

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jamescrowley
Might also want to specify if you want the numbers in USD or local currency

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tshakur
Also good catch.

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rdl
This is a great idea for a research topic, but badly executed, which is sad,
because it will produce garbage data in an important area.

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tshakur
How would you make it better?

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nostrademons
Look up "voluntary response bias" in any statistics tutorial. The general
lesson you'll learn: "voluntary response data is meaningless". To draw any
sort of valid conclusion, you really need random sampling.

If you can't get random sampling (which is often hard when you're looking at
something personally sensitive like income or net worth), the best you can do
is to select your population through some means presumably uncorrelated with
the quantities you're trying to measure, and then randomly sample within that.
For example, if you were a bank or other financial institution, you'd have
data on everyone's net worth, and you could randomly sample within the
population of business owners there to draw useful statistics. There's still
some sample bias (eg. perhaps the demographics of "your account holders" don't
match the demographics of "all business owners"), but at least you won't get
increased response rates from people with extreme values.

This, incidentally, is why major consumer Internet properties like Google and
Facebook are so valuable. They have data on a large swath of humanity,
selected because they own a service that virtually everyone finds helpful, and
so they can run experiments _within_ that population to draw useful
conclusions about human nature.

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andy_ppp
We might as well say "So I created this random number generator and seeded
from the Internet and allowed people to comment on the random numbers they put
in! We even gave an incredibly high example that honestly _won 't skew the
results_ at all."

When I read the example I immediately thought, man, I need to move to the bay
area... Until I realised it was made up.

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optimusclimb
Woah what am I doing wrong? Incoming 5 years ago (at age 24) was 45k a year,
and at 29:

$330k liquid split over checking and savings. 400k in "retirement accounts" \-
bearing in mind that 18k (current max 401k contribution in 2015, so this would
be higher than years ago) times 8 years (assuming starting work at age 21)
would be ~144K in contributions, so pretty damned good returns there...

then on top of that 8.4 Million in illiquid assets?

I seriously feel sometimes that there's things that have gone WAY over my head
despite living around here for 8+ years and working in tech.

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powera
You clearly didn't start a company with a $15 million exit. I'm sure all the
advice/numbers here will have a MASSIVE MASSIVE amount of selection bias and
probably don't apply unless you're guaranteed to be making millions.

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tshakur
We want the one person company all the way to the 1000 person company to fill
out the info. Please, we'd love to here your story, regardless if it was a hit
or not...just as long as you were or are doing it fulltime.

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rachellaw
I'm assuming that the founders they're looking for are already on a Series A
or have a nice cushion of savings or positive cashflow? I'm making 5x lower
than I previously did (thanks for reminding me!) after bootstrapping through
all my savings and such.

TBH it seems like they're doing a survey to confirm a story they've already
written on founder successes. That's a good, rags-to-riches story but the hard
numbers is that 80% of startups will fail within 3 years and those founders
will be financially burned.

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tshakur
No no - we have zero assumptions. We want anyone who's making a living as a
founder. You can be a one man operation, 500+ employees, or anything in
between.

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tshakur
We'd love for you to fill out the survey, and please put in the comment boxes
what your situation is.

This isn't just for the big series A people. In fact, it's to show that
everyone is different.

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eldavido
I'd be more interested in something representative of a broader sample than
just those who've "made it". The interview in the article advises "Bet on
yourself instead of saving in retirement accounts", I wonder how that would
change if she hadn't had a 7-figure exit?

OTOH maybe you just need to be so self-assured to the point of being
delusional to succeed at this game. ;) But tautologically, not everyone can be
"above average".

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rbobby
Doesn't ask about debt... which is a bit odd.

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tshakur
added!

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nabaraz
| Bet on yourself instead of saving in retirement accounts. You will make more
money in the future, so instead of putting $100 a week in your retirement
account, spend it on books or working your side project.

I cant stress how true it is.

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icedchai
You should do both and hedge your bets.

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wdewind
This type of data is subject to so many biases there is no way to make it
useful (in fact I'd argue that it is actually worse than useless, it's
misleading and incorrect). I'd love to be corrected on this, so if you have
ideas for gathering this kind of data in a useful/non-biased way I'd love to
hear it.

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tshakur
We'd love to hear your opinion as well. How do you think we can do it?

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NDizzle
My entry would be awesome. $3.46 here, $822.12 there... You get the picture.

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kdamken
Really looking forward to seeing the results. Still, what a redonkulous amount
of money. Must be nice to sell a business and then move right into a comfy
$250k a year job.

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keraz
This is rad. Can't wait to see the results.

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codeonfire
Who is stupid enough to give away all their financial information into a
random web form for nothing.

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narrator
I like the "bet on yourself" advice that the one F/29 founder gives.

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ebahnx
Really simple survey idea, I'm surprised no one has done this in a while.

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fahim305
great idea @ the hustle. now share the data with me so I feel like crap about
how relatively poor I am :-D

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tshakur
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