How Much Can You Lose on a Failed Startup Investment?

Our research into unicorn returns found that winning early-stage deals generate higher return multiples than winning later-stage deals because they tend to follow a more extreme power law distribution.

The inverse also happens to be true—losses from money-losing early-stage deals are more extreme than losses from money-losing later-stage deals.

The average loss from a losing seed-stage investment is 5% worse than the average loss from a Series A or B investment and 24% worse than the average loss from a growth-stage investment.

While losses are more pronounced at seed, it’s evident that investors will lose a vast majority of their principal investment in a money-losing startup regardless if they invest at early-stage (generally considered more risky) or later-stage (considered more de-risked).

This would suggest the distribution for money-losing deals isn’t as extreme as it is for successful deals. The degree to which your losers lose at seed vs. Series C is more similar than the degree to which your winners win at seed vs. Series C (that is to say, the losses are extreme across the board).

Note that it’s still less common for later-stage deals to be money-losing. In our dataset, a vast majority of the money-losing deals occurred at seed. But if you’re unfortunate enough to invest in a later-stage deal that loses money, your losses will only be marginally less severe than that of your earlier-stage co-investors.

Finding the Diamond in the Rough

We now know that when startups fail, investors will likely lose most, if not all, of their principal. This holds true regardless of whether they invested at seed or later-stage.

Despite this fact, top-quartile venture capital returns have outperformed the S&P 500 over the last 20 years. This performance is driven by the outsized successes in the venture capital market. Many deals fail and those investors lose their entire principal, but the gains on winning deals more than make up for those losses.

Therefore, assuming a hypothetical investor is broadly indexing into every credible deal (a strategy supported by research), they may not be overly concerned about money-losing investments because of these power law dynamics. They expect most of their investments to go to zero, because it only takes one winning investment to potentially 100x their return (there are also tax benefits for investors to counter loss aversion).

In other words, your losses are limited to 1x your money when investing in a startup, but your upside limit is 100x or more (just ask early investors in Uber, Amazon, and Facebook).

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Footnotes

• Investments have a listed gross multiple of less than 0.99x to exclude phantom micro-losses from truncated decimals in recorded share prices.
• Investments must have been priced and raised in USD (to avoid any issues with exchange rates).