Who stands behind the hottest web3/crypto startups?
Hi everyone! Today we start our publication with… web3 founders 💻
Crypto startups appear almost daily, and some of them really rock! But how do you identify the prospectiveness of a particular crypto startup/project at the very early stage of its development, when there’s no on-chain and off-chain available yet, or the data is limited? That’s the question we’re going to answer today partially.
As you may know, Contora team is tracking crypto projects globally (more than 7,400 ones!) to discover valuable signals for empowering your investment decisions. Recently we decided to discover and add another alternative data point on cryptos — we identified the hottest crypto & web3 startups and put together a list of their founders (more than 2k!) with analytics.
How did we do that?
We selected the top ~1,500 projects from Coinmarketcap and CB in the web3/crypto sector and found their founders. We collected the main fields for each founder from their LinkedIn profiles and other sources — work experience, education, Ph.D. status, entrepreneurial background, and much more. Then, we normalized each indicator and, as a result, got a score from 0 to 100 for each founder, where 100 — is the highest-class founder.
Below you can see a sample Airtable table for 60 random founders from our list, together with all the fields and our scoring metric:
But the primary value is not in the scoring as in the list itself. Scoring simply helps in sorting founders out. Let’s dive deeper into insights from this dataset!
Quick Facts to gain your interest:
- Avg Size of Founding Team — 1
- Avg Company age — 4 years and 4 months
- Avg Team Size — 46 Employees
- Avg Years of Experience — 12 years (!)
Breakdown by countries:
- The US 🇺🇸 is in the lead with 555 founders
- The United Kingdom 🇬🇧 — 184
- Singapour 🇸🇬 — 123
- UAE 🇦🇪 — 105
- Canada 🇨🇦 — 78
- India 🇮🇳 — 75
- Switzerland, China, Germany, and Australia are closing the top 10 countries by the number of crypto startup founders.
What about their education? 🧑🎓 They came from these universities:
- Harvard University — 33
- Stanford — 31
- University of California — 26
- MIT — 23
- National University of Singapore — 18
The most popular previous job places:
- IBM
- Microsoft
- Accenture
- Deloitte
And… the final portion of insights:
- 44% are Serial Founders (1013)
- 66% had Senior positions before (1535)
- 24% are immigrants (562)
- 10% have Ph.D. status (229)
- 17% educated from top US universities (404)
Who’ll benefit from this data? Most of the companies from our analysis are seeking funding and looking to hire. So if you are a VC or Web3 enthusiast, you will definitely be interested in taking a look.
Besides scoring and alternative data fields for each crypto/web3 founder, with flexible filtering options, the dataset includes the founders’ LinkedIn links in case you want to connect.
P.S. If you are interested in getting access to the complete dataset of 2k+ founders and other off-chain and technology-related crypto data, just drop me a line at vlad at contora.ai or reply in the comments describing how you’ll utilize it, and I’ll gladly provide the access.
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