As a pretty big football fan one of the highlights for me of SEVC was Thomas Dimitroff's luncheon keynote speech. The focus of his talk was on the importance of team, which I thought to be most a propos, as a good cohesive team is important to success on both the gridiron and in the startup world.

Well somewhere along the way Dimitroff put up this slide.

 
While he did not make the connection is his talk, it immediately dawned on me that these brutal facts of reality applied to technology startups as well. I have not been able to find any data to back this up but I think you can generally apply the above to technology startups by changing a few words. It goes something like this based on my experience.

About 10% of every startup concept gets to revenue and of those maybe 10% are reviewed by venture capitalists. Of those .3% get invited to give an partner presentation and about .03% get venture funded. A 10x return? .003%. So if you accept this hypothesis, the chance of your startup getting venture funded and a 10x return are about the same as a high school football player growing up to play in the National Football League until they are 30. And to think growing up I wanted nothing more in the world than to be Dick Butkus (truth).

One of the smartest things I heard during the conference came out of the mouth of David Cummings. He said most startups should not seek outside funding. These brutal facts of reality back him up.

A special thanks to Barbara and Melanie at Imlay Investments for getting me a copy of Dimitroff's slide.