Who We Back

Fifteen to twenty years inside an industry gives you something that cannot be manufactured, borrowed, or taught in a program. You know where the real problems are. You know why previous attempts to solve them failed. You know which solutions the market will accept and which it will resist. You have the relationships, the credibility, and the judgment that only come from being close to the work for a long time.

That is not a background. That is an unfair advantage. And it is exactly the founder FORMER works with.

59% of startup founders worldwide are over 40. Only 16% are between 20 and 30.

Source: US Census Bureau

The Advantage Venture Capital Keeps Underpricing

Venture capital tends to evaluate founders on startup credentials — prior companies built, capital raised, exits achieved. What that misses is the founder who has spent a career earning something more fundamental: a deep, operational understanding of the market they are now building in.

The networks that took decades to build don't show up on a pitch deck. Neither does the ability to read an organization, navigate a procurement process, or recognize a real customer from a tire-kicker. These things come from years of consequence — from being accountable for decisions that mattered and learning from the ones that didn't work. They are precisely what separates a founder who is hypothesizing about a market from one who already understands it from the inside.

Founders with 3 or more years in the same industry as their startup are twice as likely to build a top 0.1% fastest-growing company.

Source: Azoulay, Jones, Kim, Miranda. NBER / MIT / Harvard, 2018. Dataset of 2.7 million founders.

On Being a First-Time Founder

The data on serial founders is worth addressing directly. Founders who have built companies before do carry structural advantages — they know the mechanics, they have existing investor relationships, they have already made some of the expensive early mistakes.

But the research is clear on what actually drives that advantage. Serial founders succeed when they stay close to what they know — same industry, same customers, adjacent problems. When they move too far from their domain the edge largely disappears. What the data is really measuring is not startup experience. It is domain continuity.

FORMER's founders have more of that than most. Twenty years of living inside the problem they are now solving is a more durable foundation than two prior startups in unrelated spaces. The startup mechanics — structure, process, infrastructure — is what FORMER brings. The founding conviction belongs to the founder.

The average age of founders at the top 0.1% fastest-growing startups in the US is 45. A 50-year-old founder is 1.8 times more likely to build a top-growth company than a 30-year-old.

Source: Azoulay, Jones, Kim, Miranda. NBER / MIT / Harvard, 2018.

What Accumulates Over a Career

Beyond market knowledge there is a dimension that is harder to quantify but equally consequential. The judgment to make difficult decisions under uncertainty without losing composure. The ability to read people and organizations that only comes from years of being in rooms where things went wrong. The financial literacy to understand what a business actually needs to sustain itself. The self-awareness to know where the gaps are and how to build around them.

These things accumulate over time through real stakes and real consequences. They cannot be rushed. And at the moment a founder decides to build something of their own they become as important as any technical skill or market insight.

Founders with at least three years of work in the same industry before founding were 85% more likely to launch a successful startup.

Source: Harvard Business Review, 2018. Citing Azoulay et al.

The profile we look for:

• Fifteen or more years working inside an industry at a level where real decisions were made and real consequences followed.
• A specific opportunity they can see clearly because of where they have been. Not a trend they read about but a problem they have lived with.
• The conviction to build something real and the patience to build it right. Not optimizing for the fastest exit but for something durable that sustains itself.
• A readiness to work with a genuine partner — to share the build, accept the challenge, and move faster because of it.