In the meantime, here’s interesting research that validates the notion that founders, with successful exits or not, have accelerated careers pre- and post-founding startups. Emphasis mine.

Using both seniority and wages to measure career progression, we find that founders display accelerated career achievement prior to founding, significantly outperforming contemporaneous graduates of same-tier colleges with similar first jobs. Post-entrepreneurship, founders keep advancing. After exiting their start-ups, they obtain jobs about three years more senior than their pre-founding peers, who are contemporaneous graduates of same-tier colleges with similar jobs right before a start-up’s launch. Importantly, while a start-up’s success offers a stronger seniority boost to its founder, even failed founders land jobs with higher seniority than those attained by their peers in the meantime. Although we cannot fully eliminate selection concerns, these results do suggest that VC-backed entrepreneurs receive significant benefits when returning to the labor market—even if their venture has not led to an IPO or a high-value acquisition.

From Failing Just Fine: Assessing Careers of Venture Capital-backed Entrepreneurs Via a Non-Wage Measure (Link)

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