The Kauffman Foundation, the world's largest foundation devoted to entrepreneurship, recently released a new study entitled "Making of a Successful Entrepreneur."

In the study the research team explored company founders' opinions and observations about what influenced the success or failure of their businesses. The research is based on a survey of 549 company founders in a variety of industries, including aerospace
and defense, computer and electronics, health care, and services.

The researchers asked the company founders to rank the importance of a number of factors on the success of their business. The key takeaway is that these founders believe that experience, management, and luck are the biggest drivers.

• 96 percent ranked prior work experience as an important success factor
• 88 percent said that learning from previous successes, and 78 percent said that learning from previous failures, played an important role in their present successes
• 82 percent said their management team was important to their success
• 73 percent said that good fortune was an important
  factor in their success.entrepreneurs

Lines up pretty well with Malcolm Gladwell's conclusion in "Outliers", successful people are not that way due to personal ambition alone, it's a combination of circumstances that some would call luck coupled with expertise based on practice.

Back to the Kauffman study, some more interesting findings.

• Availability of financing/capital was considered important to the success of their current businesses by 68 percent of respondents
• 50 percent of Entrepreneurs ranked location as not at all important
• Of the entrepreneurs who received advice from investors, 38 percent said it was not at all important

The sources of funding these entrepreneurs used to start their business is of great interest. The most significant source of funding was personal savings.  The funding sources broke down as follows.

• 70 percent used personal savings
• 13 percent took friends and family money
• 11 percent venture capital
• 9 percent had angel investors

Some of the findings of the study line up pretty nicely with my experience.  A good team with domain expertise has a better chance of creating a successful startup.  Having those attributes is good.  They are actually controllable. 

The subject of non disclosure agreements has come up from time to time on FoG.  ATDC and investors do not sign NDAs.

Entrepreneurs don’t seem to like that and often try to slip non disclosures and confidentiality clauses in presentations, emails, and the like.

I recently received this email, reproduced in its entirety.  The personal information of the sender has been masked.

Please find the attached document for review purposes.

Name
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
MyStartup, Inc.
Office #: 314.159.2653

NOTICE: This e-mail message and all attachments transmitted with it contain legally privileged and/or copyrighted, confidential information intended solely for the review of the addressee. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient – without regard of if this message were forwarded to the reader by the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any reading, dissemination, distribution, copying, or other use of this message or its attachments is strictly prohibited without the expressed written consent of MyStartup, Inc. If you have received this message in error, please notify MyStartup, Inc. immediately by telephone  (314.159.2653) or by electronic mail info@mystartup.com and delete this message and all copies and backups thereof.

By downloading any attached materials, you agree to maintain the attachments as confidential. Therefore, they should not be disclosed or forwarded to any third parties without the expressed written consent of MyStartup, Inc. Any breaches of said confidentiality will be dealt with to the full extent of the law.

So here is an entrepreneur reaching out to me to review their business, seeking advice, and outlining legal action if I break some click through confidentiality agreement. I don’t think so. My reply in it’s entirety.

I am deleting this email. If you care to send something without the legal footer we can proceed.

It’s tempting for both experienced and first-time entrepreneurs to slide notices of confidentiality into documents.  Resist the temptation.  It shows a certain lack of sophistication that as an entrepreneur you do not want to project.