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Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

I love this one:

How confident are you that you're building a billion dollar company?

    18.6%  I'm certain we will
    41.8%  I'm confident we have a decent shot
    23.2%  It's possible, but I'm not so sure
    10.1%  I doubt it
     6.4%  Definitely not

They interviewed 869 venture-backed founders to get the data.

As of December 2017, WSJ lists 168 VC-backed private companies valued at over $1B in the entire world.

Meanwhile, how many years until you think you'll be profitable?

    14.4%  Already profitable
    18.3%  <1
    50.2%  1-2
    13.7%  3-5
     3.5%  >5

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Isn't delusional overconfidence practically a prerequisite to get through the VC filter? Chris Sacca for instance once praised Systrom for talking in radical future-spect when raising seed funding (paraphrasing, 'once we reach 50 million users, we'll add this...').

If the VC community is applying selective pressure to identify that type of person, then it's no surprise that these kinds of surveys will reflect that. VCs know most of these companies will fail, but their portfolio mechanics still make it the right game to play. On the flip side, entrepreneurs know they have to deploy an airtight reality distortion field. Bidirectional obfuscation is practically an emergent property of the industry.

On the flip side, entrepreneurs know they have to deploy an airtight reality distortion field.

When dealing with the outside world, sure, the appearance of having faith in your business is important. But believing your own hype to the point of wildly overestimating your prospects doesn't seem like a healthy characteristic in anyone running a business. At some point it's probably going to lead to bad decision-making.

People seem unlikely to consider a VC survey to be the place to confess their deepest fears honestly.

As in a job interview, if someone asked "What is your biggest flaw as an employee?" They are unlikely to get a useful reply: "Sometimes I work so hard that I make other people feel bad" perhaps

#33 What’s the hardest executive hire you've made? (Choose one)

2.6% Finance

Well, I see some sort of correlation here.

*EDIT: Two options - either there are so many brilliant finance people looking for jobs or finance is not so important (although it obviously should be).

A finance employee isn't necessary until you're bigger. Like the two companies I know who have one part-time and mainly got them for Credit Control because they were actually making money and they were in an industry with lots of late payers.

The need for a finance executive? Comes when you start getting silly money.

Accounting always was and always will be more important at a startup. Finance is a distraction and doesn’t become important until you’re big enough to care about it.

To be fair to their sense of confidence, there are a number of billion dollar companies that still aren't profitable, correct?

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