The Startup Founder Wealth Survey
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
Well-off people who feel like bragging about their wealth are not representative of the group as a whole, nor would you know what fraction of the group they comprise. The same goes for not-so-well-off people who feel like sharing. Then there will also be posers and fakes. You just cannot extract anything meaningful from a sample of 100 of this sort of data.
If you can't get random sampling (which is often hard when you're looking at something personally sensitive like income or net worth), the best you can do is to select your population through some means presumably uncorrelated with the quantities you're trying to measure, and then randomly sample within that. For example, if you were a bank or other financial institution, you'd have data on everyone's net worth, and you could randomly sample within the population of business owners there to draw useful statistics. There's still some sample bias (eg. perhaps the demographics of "your account holders" don't match the demographics of "all business owners"), but at least you won't get increased response rates from people with extreme values.
This, incidentally, is why major consumer Internet properties like Google and Facebook are so valuable. They have data on a large swath of humanity, selected because they own a service that virtually everyone finds helpful, and so they can run experiments within that population to draw useful conclusions about human nature.
The group will not be representative of the total population of entrepreneurs/founders, but the group will give internally high response rate and thus significance for that group. And an ACCURATE survey of Stanford alum founders will actually be more representative of overall founders than a voluntary-response set would be.
You then ALSO ask better questions. That's also bad in this survey, but not the worst part -- the voluntary response bias is.
(I want to be positive overall, though -- it is awesome that you are surveying this. I just want you to do the best job possible.)
When I read the example I immediately thought, man, I need to move to the bay area... Until I realised it was made up.
$330k liquid split over checking and savings. 400k in "retirement accounts" - bearing in mind that 18k (current max 401k contribution in 2015, so this would be higher than years ago) times 8 years (assuming starting work at age 21) would be ~144K in contributions, so pretty damned good returns there...
then on top of that 8.4 Million in illiquid assets?
I seriously feel sometimes that there's things that have gone WAY over my head despite living around here for 8+ years and working in tech.
That's the only other one I can think of.
Idle thoughts.
Startups in and around SF generate between 500 and 1,000 new millionaires per year on average over the past 5 years. The big dump of Twitter (~1,000) and FB millionaires (~3,000?) all at once during some years skew the averages.
All the excess liquid wealth adds up after a while (and now you can't afford a one bedroom apartment unless you make over $200k per year because everybody else is so individually wealthy and practically insensitive to prices.)
TBH it seems like they're doing a survey to confirm a story they've already written on founder successes. That's a good, rags-to-riches story but the hard numbers is that 80% of startups will fail within 3 years and those founders will be financially burned.
This isn't just for the big series A people. In fact, it's to show that everyone is different.
OTOH maybe you just need to be so self-assured to the point of being delusional to succeed at this game. ;) But tautologically, not everyone can be "above average".
I cant stress how true it is.