The 5th Annual January Ventures Early Stage Founder Sentiment Report is here!
We surveyed over 400 early stage founders about company building, fundraising, sentiment and challenges. Join the conversation on how we can support founders at this unique moment in time.
We are excited to launch our 5th annual early stage founder report. Our sample included 437 founders across North America (60%) and Europe (40%), and is one of the largest and widest-ranging surveys of early stage founders. 48% of the respondents were female and 53% were people of color. It reveals founder sentiment, challenges, the power of networks, and how founders are reacting to a challenging macroeconomic environment.
Read the coverage in Techcrunch and the key takeaways below.
Overall founder sentiment indicates the early stage fundraising market may be coming back.
Early stage founders’ optimism about their ability to raise capital is at a 5 year high.
However, the story is different for female and BIPOC founders. Female founder optimism is at a 5 year low.
71% of female founders feel their gender has held them back as an entrepreneur.
The gulf between male and female founders remains wide: 50% more men than women feel optimistic about raising capital.
Black and Latinx founders are facing similar challenges, with 49% reporting they paused their raise or faced issues raising.
Networks are core to early stage venture, and can accelerate funding, sales and hiring for well-connected founders.
If you want to raise an early stage round, spend time with other founders: they are the most important intros for fundraising.
The majority of pre-seed funding comes from friends & family or personal capital. For founders who don’t have access to these funding sources, they risk being undercapitalized from the start.
Male founder networks are more likely to accelerate their sales and hiring efforts.
85% of early stage founders have less than 12 months runway, despite cutting team size and software spend.
Runways continue to be short: similar to last year, 85% of early stage founders have less than 12 months runway.
While last year early stage founders hadn’t yet cut costs, this year they have taken action to decrease hiring, team size and software spend.
Layoffs aren’t leading to a significant number of new company formations: only 4% of respondents said a layoff contributed to them founding a company.
You can read the full report and see the rest of the insights unearthed in the 2023 survey here.
Each year, we hope that publishing this report and sharing it with the broader tech and venture community drives conversation on how we can work together to enact change. We encourage you to share the results and continue sharing your stories, so we can better support the next generation of innovators.
We’d like to acknowledge and thank our partners: HSBC Innovation Banking, Fidelity for Startups, and Gunderson Dettmer. These partners are actively serving founders from the earliest stage, and their generous support made this research and distribution possible.
Share your thoughts! Join the conversation on LinkedIn.