Deedy Das says founders with top VC experience had the strongest odds of winning lead investors
Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das used Harmonic data to study 8,525 U.S. startups founded between 2019 and 2026, comparing 63 founder-background traits to see which profiles were more likely to secure a lead investor from a top venture capital firm at the seed or Series A stage. The highest-ranked factor was prior experience at a top VC firm, which was associated with roughly 2.83x higher odds than otherwise similar peers. Experience at frontier AI labs and backgrounds in cybersecurity followed at 2.16x and 2.03x, respectively. The study also listed several other positive signals, including elite university backgrounds at 1.41x and former Google employees at 1.29x. Das noted that former VC employees in the dataset were not limited to investors, but also included entrepreneurs-in-residence, researchers, and interns, with some having incubated projects inside funds. On the negative side, the odds ratio was 0.65 for founders with MBAs, 0.59 for founders educated in China, and 0.57 when the oldest founder on the team was over 50.
