What happened to the early leaders at 30 outlier companies

Executive bench outcomes at 30 companies that reached IPO or a valuation above $5bn, including Stripe, Databricks, Snowflake, Atlassian, Shopify and Anduril.

Bar chart. Every company with a C-level sales executive before Series B replaced them by Series C, and every company with a CFO by Series C replaced them before IPO. 65% hired the CTO who took them public at Series D or later. No Series B sales leader was still heading the function at IPO or Series E, and no VP Engineering promoted to CTO near Series B was still CTO at IPO.

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Published in 2022, covering the SaaS and marketplace generation. All 30 were successful outcomes, so every transition here happened inside a company that worked.

Source: Felicis, A Practical Framework for Scaling Your Executive BenchGet the data