I think that it's very very hard to predict which team is the best to pull off the creation of a hugely successful company.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would initially have failed all tests, having no experience and no prior successes to lean on. Ars Technica is (at least according to Philip Greenspun) a great example of how a supposedly excellent and experienced outside CEO manages to run a company into the ground.
It's interesting to note that you can get a good idea of the market, the idea, and the founders ability to pull it off technically: Are they good hackers or not, do they have a working prototype, etc. But you can't really test whether they'll be able to grow the company to a multimillion dollar business. The pallette of succesful founders of software companies seems to be incredibly varied, from the arrogant but stylish Larry Ellison, over the nerdy and introvert Bill Gates to the frat boy that is Kevin Rose. I don't see many correlations that would be obvious, or even detectable, at an early stege in their careers.
Maybe what makes a company rise to the very top isn't the leadership but external factors. Luck basiccally. Surely a company needs good leadership, but beyond a certain baseline it probably isn't the defining factor of ultimate success. The best VC's can do is to weed out the people that are obviously unqualified to run a company, they obviously can't accurately pick the ones that will win the lottery.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both had experience and prior (minor) successes. Bill Gates had rigged - excuse me, programmed ;-) - the course scheduling program at his prep school to seat him next to all the pretty girls, and had done decently as a consultant doing traffic-light control software. Steve Jobs had a prior profitable business with Steve Wozniak selling blue boxes.
The thing is, many readers of this site have had successes of similar magnitude. And very few, probably none, will ever create something like Microsoft or Apple. So a VC might see someone who created a bunch of websites, some even mildly successful - but lots of people created a bunch of websites, and the vast majority of those won't grow into a billion dollar business.
"Bill Gates had rigged - excuse me, programmed ;-) - the course scheduling program at his prep school to seat him next to all the pretty girls, and had done decently as a consultant doing traffic-light control software. Steve Jobs had a prior profitable business with Steve Wozniak selling blue boxes."
Notably, only one of those things (traffic-light-control software) is considered a socially acceptable use of one's talents, though rigging the course scheduling program is more of a prank than a crime.
It was "Ars Digita." And Kevin Rose doesn't really fit there, at least until there's an exit. And probably not even then (the others were CEOs, Kevin is not).
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would initially have failed all tests, having no experience and no prior successes to lean on. Ars Technica is (at least according to Philip Greenspun) a great example of how a supposedly excellent and experienced outside CEO manages to run a company into the ground.
It's interesting to note that you can get a good idea of the market, the idea, and the founders ability to pull it off technically: Are they good hackers or not, do they have a working prototype, etc. But you can't really test whether they'll be able to grow the company to a multimillion dollar business. The pallette of succesful founders of software companies seems to be incredibly varied, from the arrogant but stylish Larry Ellison, over the nerdy and introvert Bill Gates to the frat boy that is Kevin Rose. I don't see many correlations that would be obvious, or even detectable, at an early stege in their careers.
Maybe what makes a company rise to the very top isn't the leadership but external factors. Luck basiccally. Surely a company needs good leadership, but beyond a certain baseline it probably isn't the defining factor of ultimate success. The best VC's can do is to weed out the people that are obviously unqualified to run a company, they obviously can't accurately pick the ones that will win the lottery.