First Round's founder survey read 2020 fundraising as harder

The record

First Round Capital's State of Startups 2019 survey, the firm says, reached 'hundreds of startup builders,' and for the first time expanded beyond founders to include startup employees. The survey reports that 65% of founders expected capital to be harder to raise in 2020, up from the 44% who expected that in the prior year's edition, and that 70% expected the balance of negotiating power to shift toward investors. It also reports that 70% of female founders said their gender had hurt their ability to raise, and that over two-thirds of respondents who ventured a view believed the technology sector was in a bubble, the highest share the survey had recorded. An earlier State of Startups 2018 page describes that edition's scope as covering 'the fundraising climate, exit environment' and related founder questions.

What the documents establish

The survey is First Round's own self-reported instrument, distributed to founders and, from 2019, employees who chose to respond; it is not a random sample of the startup population and not an audited dataset. The document establishes what that self-selected group told First Round in a given year, and the firm's own framing treats year-over-year shifts, such as the move from 44% to 65% expecting a harder fundraise, as sentiment change within its respondent pool rather than a market-wide statistic. The survey series ended after several annual editions, and no edition later than 2019 was found live or archived under the same address, which matters for anyone tempted to describe First Round sentiment as an ongoing, current benchmark.

The operating read

Editorially, a founder sentiment survey is most useful as a record of what a network of operators believed at a specific moment, not as a forecast that came true. The 2019 edition's gloomier tone anticipated the tighter 2020 fundraising environment that did in fact follow for many companies, but the survey itself cannot establish causation between founder belief and market outcome, only that the belief was recorded before the outcome. A reader citing this survey today should say plainly that it describes founder sentiment in 2019, not investor behavior since.

What to check before you decide

Before citing a State of Startups figure, check the following.

• Which year's edition is being cited, given the series stopped publishing after 2019?
• Is the figure a founder response, an employee response, or a blend, since the 2019 edition surveyed both separately?
• Is a sentiment figure, such as expected fundraising difficulty, being presented as a realized outcome rather than a stated belief?

The survey is a documented snapshot of founder opinion at one point, useful for historical context about how a network felt heading into a specific year, not a live benchmark to be updated by assumption.