The 2020 World of Startups

First Round published their summary on their annual State of Startups just before Christmas. Their fifth edition of State of Startups is based on one of the largest datasets with 3600 submissions and over 190K data points!

I didn’t see their list of survey questions, but the span of topics represented in their summary range from fund-raising and exits, to human resources issues and work habits. There are even questions on mental health.

The presentation of the data is worth exploring. One can toggle between founder and employee responses; some questions were only posed to one of the groups. The differences are interesting to note.

Bubble concerns

A majority of founders believe we are in a tech bubble in the private markets, a higher percentage than the past few years (2016–2018). The survey doesn’t ask founders why, but I can only imagine that it pertains to the bigger and bigger funds that are being announced, or maybe it’s based on observations on what is being funded (AI for anything, everything, nothing?).

Rockier road raising