A $1B exit - 8x harder than getting into Harvard

Founder Collective ranked the 500 largest value drivers in venture history and put the odds against a benchmark everyone has an intuition for. Harvard admits roughly 4% of applicants.

- about 0.5% of ~100,000 venture-backed companies over 25 years exit above $1B
- only ~70 companies ever cleared $10B, which is 56x rarer than a Harvard acceptance
- $775M was the cutoff just to make the top 500 list
- IPOs priced six months out, when lockups expire, not at the first-day pop

The harsher half is the fund math underneath: a $1B fund needs a $10B outcome to work, which is the rarest event on this list.

https://foundercollective.com/blog/a-1b-exit-is-8x-harder-than-getting-into-harvard-a-10b-exit-is-56x-harder/

📎 Read also:
→ 92% of US small-business exits are shutdowns
→ $300B Q1 VC, four companies took 65%
→ Carta - over 70% of vested options expire