Approximately 90% of startups fail.
That failure rate is high enough to scare promising would-be founders off the journey. It scares me just to look at it.
But we don’t have to accept this statistic. And it’s the people who have beaten this trend who are best-placed to change it.
Reid Hoffman (the founder of LinkedIn), Naval Ravikant (the founder of AngelList), Marc Andreessen (the co-founder of Netscape), and Ben Horowitz (the co-founder of LoudCloud) are all great examples of success stories who have given something priceless back to the entrepreneurial community.
I’m not just referring to their capital, but their wisdom, their time, and their scars. They’ve authored books and used their platforms to pull back the curtain on the playbook of building, breaking, and rebuilding companies, helping founders everywhere avoid landmines and scale faster.
Their stories are set against the backdrop of Silicon Valley, but the spirit behind them – the ethos of give first – has universal currency.
After all, that’s how Silicon Valley itself was built. Founders helped founders. Investors were often ex-operators. Networks were built on trust and reciprocity rather than extractive transactions. The PayPal Mafia famously spawned dozens of companies, each one paying forward what they’d learned from the last. It’s a compounding loop of generosity that fuels innovation.
For me, that’s always been the heartbeat of entrepreneurship. It’s not just about the money. It’s about the multiplier effect of experience, energy, and belief. It’s about helping others build their own version of success with fewer bruises than you got along the way.
When we started SuperAwesome in 2013, the UK tech scene was still finding its identity. There were flashes of brilliance but not yet the deep mentoring networks or cultural norms that existed in Silicon Valley. We had to learn fast and lean heavily on each other. Over time, we built not just a company, but a community – one that believed in doing the right thing for the next generation, quite literally, since our business was about making the digital world safer for kids.
That mission-driven culture naturally extended to how we treated people inside the business. At SuperAwesome, one of the things I’m most proud of isn’t just the company we built or the exit we achieved, it’s the number of people who’ve come through the business and gone on to start companies of their own or lead other tech companies. Many were young, ambitious, and figuring things out in real time, just as we once were. Watching them build something from scratch has been one of the most fulfilling parts of the journey.
Whenever it makes sense, we back them. Sometimes with funding, often with advice, introductions, or just the occasional sanity check. That’s the art of giving back: you can’t measure it in pounds or percentages; it’s measured in confidence transferred and doors opened. Huge credit to some of the amazing founders I worked with that have gone on to create new ventures like Mindstone, Capably, Oxivia, Data Pocket, 10x and Voort Studio.
The truth is, success without contribution feels hollow. The real joy of building something isn’t just the exit, it’s the ripple effect. There’s a new generation of founders, many of whom cut their teeth at scale-ups like SuperAwesome, Deliveroo, Monzo, or Revolut, now building the next wave of companies. They’re armed not just with capital but with context. And crucially, they’re starting to give back too. That’s what creates a real ecosystem – when success doesn’t leave the building but instead circulates.
So yes, Hoffman, Ravikant, Andreessen, and Horowitz have set the tone for what giving back looks like at scale. But the rest of us – the founders, operators, mentors, and dreamers dotted around Shoreditch, Soho, or Manchester – have our own version to play. We might not have billion-dollar funds or bestselling books, but we have something just as valuable: a desire to see others win.
Entrepreneurship is a team sport played across generations. The more we give, the stronger the team becomes. And that, more than any valuation or exit, is what truly defines success.
