I have seen this happen twice now:<p>Someone launches a no-one-knows-about-it start-up company, and raises angel / series A funding. The company gets acquired for $5m.<p>Next thing I see is that the founder is now a partner at an incubator and working as a tech investor. I have seen this at both yCombinator and 500-startups. Case in point: Harj Taggar.<p>How is this possible? After the acquisition the founder would have barely netted $2m. Is the bar for entry to partnership at a prestigious place like YC so low?
Building a business that exits for $5m makes you an exceptional founder, especially a decade ago. That was only a few years after the dot.com crash. And Harj did it in about a year and a half, so you can't really compare his business to the decade or more of growth of businesses like Facebook or Uber.<p>Any exit is quite rare; one that returns a decent multiple to the investors is much more rare. Don't put down the hard work and exceptional capability of a founder who achieves success.