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The author spends a lot of time justifying why he thinks it's possible to pick "winning" startups, but then readily admits "it’s true you will probably not be better than the top individual venture investors."

So why not ask only one question of founders: "Are you backed by one of the top individual venture investors?"

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Careful. The top venture investors are also disproportionately likely to back only companies with a clear argument for a billion dollar valuation. That argument is accompanied by commensurate risk. The VC doesn't care that the startup is far more likely than not to fail; failure is accounted for in their portfolio math. But you might!

Depending on the structure of your comp package, the interests of the top investors are not necessarily aligned with those of a software developer.

> failure is accounted for in their portfolio math. But you might!

Exactly. Assuming the common claim of "90% of startups fail" (i.e., assuming each startup is IID with 90% chance to fail), an investor that invests in 7 or more startups has a more than 50% chance of seeing at least one succeed (1 - 0.9^7 > 50%), whereas as an employee of one of those startups, you still have a 90% chance of failure.

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