According to a study by researchers at the Wharton School, the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Zurich (UZH), 88% of founders of venture-backed tech startups receive nothing when their company exits. The specialist site Fintechnews Switzerland presented the findings on 9 November 2026. The data cover US startups: there, a startup exit mainly makes a small minority of founders rich.
What does the Wharton and University of Zurich study measure?
The study tracks what each founder receives at the time of the exit, meaning the acquisition or IPO of their company. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a US economic research organisation, published a summary of it on 26 March 2026. It is working paper No. 34512, titled "Dilution vs. Risk Taking: Capital Gains Taxes and Entrepreneurship".
Its four authors are Eduardo M. Azevedo, Florian Scheuer, Kent Smetters and Min Yang. According to the NBER, Florian Scheuer received support for this work from a "Consolidator" grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
According to this summary, the researchers assembled around 96,000 venture-backed US startups, 48,000 exits, 167,000 funding rounds and 180,000 founders, from 1987 to 2021. The data come from filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US securities regulator, and from providers such as PitchBook, CB Insights, PrivCo, S&P Capital IQ and Compustat.
The method tracks founders' dilution round after round, up to the exit. The gains obtained then feed into a model in which each person chooses between starting a company and remaining an employee. The paper's central question is a tax one: it compares two ways of taxing capital gains in the United States, on sale or annually on unrealised gains.
Why the figures differ between versions
The figures reported by Fintechnews are not those of the NBER summary from March 2026. Fintechnews refers to a new study covering nearly 250,000 founders. The orders of magnitude remain close, as the comparison shows.
| Indicator | Fintechnews (9 November 2026) | NBER summary (26 March 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Founders analysed | nearly 250,000 | around 180,000 |
| Founders who receive nothing | 88% | 84% (16% receive a gain) |
| Cases where all of a company's founders lose everything | 81% | 74% |
| Average gain, all founders combined | 5.6 million dollars | 7.2 million dollars after tax |
| Average gain of founders who receive something | 47.3 million dollars | 45.6 million dollars |
| Median gain of those same founders | 4.8 million dollars | 5.6 million dollars |
| Share of value captured by the best-off 2% of founders | 89% | 80% |
In both versions, the average is misleading. According to Fintechnews, the 90th percentile of positive gains reaches 65.6 million dollars and the 99th percentile 661.2 million. The best-off 1% of founders alone captures 79% of total value.
Where does the money go in a startup exit?
The first cause is the liquidation preference. Venture capital investors hold preferred shares, which give them the contractual right to be repaid before all other shareholders, Fintechnews explains.
In a modest sale, the price may approach or remain below the total funds raised. Almost all of the proceeds then go to repaying the investors. Founders and employees, who hold common shares, receive little or nothing. Fintechnews calls these "bad exits".
The second cause is dilution. Each round brings in new shareholders and reduces the founders' stake, which the study recalculates at each stage. The calculation of founder dilution depends on the amount raised and the agreed valuation.
The third cause is the founder leaving before the exit. Even in companies that achieve a successful exit, a founder has a 39% risk of leaving beforehand and receiving nothing, according to Fintechnews. The board of directors may replace them with a professional executive, or a conflict between co-founders may push them out.
On leaving, they generally lose their unvested shares. So-called "bad leaver" clauses may also force them to sell the rest back at a heavily discounted price. Fintechnews cites a study by Rice Business, the business school of Rice University in Houston: of more than 1,000 venture-backed US IPOs between 1995 and 2013, 472 companies (40.8%) changed chief executive between the first round and the listing.
Are exits just as rare in Switzerland?
Exits remain few in Switzerland. According to the half-yearly update of the Swiss Venture Capital Report, published on 14 July 2026 by Startupticker.ch and SECA (Swiss Private Equity & Corporate Finance Association), 21 exits were recorded in 2026, as many as a year earlier. The report describes them as the most important condition for a revival of venture capital.
In the first half of 2026, Swiss startups raised 1.25 billion francs, 15.5% less than a year earlier, in 123 investments, according to the same report.
Closures, for their part, hit a record. Startupticker.ch counted 158 startups liquidated in 2025, compared with 147 in 2024 and 118 in 2023, in its analysis of 24 February 2026. Liquidations of startups that had raised funds at least once rose from 20 in 2022 to 58 in 2025.
The failure rate nevertheless remains low. After ten years, it reaches 17.6%: 82.4% of startups founded in 2016 are still active. After five years, it is 9.5%, compared with 5.7% before 2022. Startupticker.ch cross-referenced around 5,600 startups in its database with the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, excluding liquidations linked to an acquisition or a reorganisation.
Does surviving mean cashing in?
No, and the comparison with the United States calls for caution. Fintechnews considers the results of Swiss entrepreneurs better, thanks to support from universities and research laboratories. The site cites spin-offs from ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich): 93% were active five years after their creation, and 81% after ten years.
These rates measure the company's survival, not what its founders receive. A Swiss startup that is still active, or that has been sold, may very well pay nothing to its founders if the liquidation preferences absorb the price. The US study, by contrast, measures each founder's gain.
What this means for a founder in Switzerland
The term sheet sets the essentials. In Switzerland, SECA publishes a free term sheet template, which it presents as the venture capital standard, with annotated versions. It exists in a "light" version, for rounds of 0.5 to 5 million francs, and a "large" version, for 5 to 20 million. Our article on the startup term sheet in Switzerland details this standard documentation.
The mechanisms described by the study point to the clauses to read closely:
- the liquidation preference: its amount compared with the company's plausible sale price;
- share vesting and leaver clauses, which decide what a founder who leaves the company keeps;
- the valuation of each round, which sets the stake given up; a startup's pre-money valuation is the starting point;
- the succession of rounds, from the seed funding round to Series A, which multiplies the dilutions.
Salary matters too. The researchers' model weighs starting a company against salaried employment. If only a minority of founders receive a gain at exit, the pay received during the startup years is often the only certain share. These figures describe past results in the United States, not a return to be expected.
What we don't know yet
- The version of the study reported by Fintechnews: its figures differ from the NBER summary from March 2026, and the article does not say where the gap comes from.
- The share of Swiss founders who receive a gain at exit: the Startupticker.ch data cover liquidations, not the value received by founders.
Sources
- Fintechnews Switzerland: 88% of Tech Founders Walk Away with Zero Exit Value (9 November 2026)
- NBER: Capital Gains Taxation and Startup Founders, summary of working paper 34512 (26 March 2026)
- Startupticker.ch: Further increase in startup liquidations (24 February 2026)
- Startupticker.ch: half-yearly update of the Swiss Venture Capital Report (14 July 2026)
- 2clics.com: Startup term sheet, the Swiss template and what announcements leave out (25 October 2026)
