Former VC Staff Had 3 Times the Odds of a Top-Fund Lead

By Nathan Brooks

Former staff at a tier 1 or tier 2 venture fund had 3.00 times the odds of landing a lead investment from such a fund, according to Deedy Das’s analysis of 4,836 U.S. startups. Founders with an MBA had 0.60 times those odds. FourWeekMBA’s arithmetic put the fund-staff signal at five times the MBA signal, 3.00 divided by 0.60.

The analysis and sample

On 31 October 2026, Das, a partner at Menlo Ventures, posted the chart on X under the title “Founder signals that predict a tier 1–2 lead.” It compared 15 founder signals with the odds of a tier 1 or tier 2 lead against otherwise similar founders, using Harmonic data on 4,836 U.S. startups from 2021 through 2024.

Das wrote: “I looked at ~60 attributes across 5000 startups and these were the 15 strongest”. The footer reads “Logit, 59 signals + controls”. The chart leaves tier 1 and tier 2 undefined, omits the controls, and gives no explanation of how founders were matched to companies.

Signals ranked highest

Das’s chart placed former employees of tier 1 and tier 2 funds first at 3.00. The next strongest signals were:

• Former Tesla or SpaceX employees: 1.83.
• Technion or Tel Aviv University graduates: 1.81.
• Founders whose last company had a tier 1 or tier 2 lead: 1.73, marked as weaker evidence.
• Founders who worked at a company backed by a tier 1 or tier 2 fund: 1.58.
• A computer science degree: 1.45.
• A top-university background: 1.41.
• Former Google employees: 1.39.
• Harvard alumni, top-company alumni, and former scale-up employees: between 1.36 and 1.38, all marked as weaker evidence.

Three of the five highest-ranked rows involve a tier 1 or tier 2 fund or a company it backed, according to FourWeekMBA. The 1.73 row carries the weaker-evidence label.

The former-fund-staff group included 183 founders. Das’s chart counted 1.2k MBA holders and 1k PhD holders; two other row counts were cut off in the image.

Signals below the baseline

Four of Das’s 15 signals fell below the 1.00 baseline:

• A PhD: 0.75.
• A fintech company: 0.74.
• The oldest founder, aged 50 or over: 0.66.
• Any MBA: 0.60.

FourWeekMBA’s arithmetic translates the 0.60 MBA result into odds about 40% lower than for otherwise similar founders.

What does this change for founders?

Former fund staff registered an odds ratio about 2.2 times that of former Google staff, 3.00 against 1.39, according to FourWeekMBA. Former Tesla or SpaceX employees registered about 1.3 times Google’s figure, 1.83 against 1.39.

FourWeekMBA said a lead investment from a top fund sets the price and terms of a round. For founders, prior work inside a tier 1 or tier 2 fund is the clearest observed advantage in Das’s chart. It does not prove that the credential will produce a lead check for every company.

Limits of the evidence

FourWeekMBA cautioned that Das’s work was an analysis shared on X, not a published, peer-reviewed study. It reported associations from a logit model with 59 signals and controls, not causal effects.

The chart presents odds ratios with 95% ranges rather than probabilities, and it flags four rows as weaker evidence. FourWeekMBA said it did not see the underlying data or code and did not contact Das.

The broader framework

FourWeekMBA also placed the chart within its Business Engineer framework, The AI Supercycle. The framework says: “The job of any operator, investor, or builder is to know which layer they are operating inside and which layer the binding constraint is rotating toward next.”

FourWeekMBA called the framework the owner’s argument and said it does not discuss Das’s chart. It treated the chart as one investor’s attempt to measure which founder backgrounds attract a top-fund lead.

The practical read is narrow: in Das’s sample, fund experience had the strongest association with a top-fund lead. Founders and investors should treat the 3.00 figure as directional until the data, code, tier definitions and controls become available.