Startup investing is often likened to betting on a racehorse, but the wisdom of whether to back the “horse” (the business model and industry) or the “jockey” (the founding team) continues to polarize venture capitalists, angel investors, and institutional financiers alike. The analogy is simple but powerful: Do you place your money on a market-leading idea or on the person driving it forward? In the startup world, this seemingly academic debate has tangible economic impacts, influencing billion-dollar fund allocations and determining whether early-stage companies sink or scale. As capital efficiency, rapid technological evolution, and talent wars reshape the market in 2025, the “Jockey vs. Horse” dilemma demands a more nuanced examination layered with data, context, and foresight.
Understanding the “Jockey vs. Horse” Paradigm
Philippe de Ridder, founder of The Board of Innovation, famously argued, “Back the jockey if you’re early; back the horse if you’re late.” In other words, early-stage startups require resilience, adaptability, and strategic pivoting—traits tied to people, not products. Conversely, once infrastructure, profitability models, and customer acquisition channels stabilize, the underlying business (the “horse”) becomes the principal value driver.
Crunchbase featured a 2024 analysis titled “Great People or Great Products?” which underscores that investors are increasingly placing more emphasis on founders’ track records and leadership qualities. According to Equidam’s Vincent Pirenne, people decisions explain up to 46% of post-seed funding outcomes. This is consistent with data from Startup Genome, which asserts that team competence correlates more strongly with startup success than initial product-market fit.
The proliferation of incubators, from Y Combinator to Techstars, frequently reveals a blunt truth: pre-product, pre-revenue startups are financed primarily on the strength of their founders. Their ability to build a team, secure IP, and iterate rapidly plays more into early-stage investor logic than the immediate viability of the product or total addressable market (TAM).
Key Drivers: Capital, Capability, and Context
The startup investment landscape in 2025 is being actively reshaped by three transformative factors: surging financial constraints, exponential technological capability, and macroeconomic shifts. Each of these pressures recalibrates how much weight is placed on the jockey versus the horse.
1. Capital Efficiency and Funding Models
With global VC investments declining 28% YOY in Q1 2025 amid reduced liquidity and higher interest rates (CNBC Markets, 2025), venture capitalists are increasingly expecting founders to demonstrate capital efficiency. Investors are more likely to fund “jockeys” who have shown they can do more with less.
Modern SaaS ventures, fueled by public cloud cost management tools and low-code platforms, are expected to reach MVP status with less than $250K in 2025, down from $500K in 2022 (Deloitte, 2025). This shifts some emphasis back to the human element: who can leverage lean operations and adjust quickly when capital is tight?
2. Scalable Technologies and AI Infrastructure
AI implementation is another game changer. According to the OpenAI 2025 blog, over 62% of startup pitches in Q2 2025 involved AI-enhanced solutions. In this saturated environment, differentiation is not just based on tooling but on execution—again, favoring the jockey. Still, plug-and-play AI models like GPT-5 and NVIDIA’s Triton inference server shift some leverage towards the horse, as off-the-shelf innovation reduces the gap between technical founders and non-technical ones.
Additionally, M&A activity shows that scalable tech exceeds founder importance beyond Series B. When Meta acquired the AI startup AtlasFlow in March 2025, the press release emphasized proprietary pre-trained models and application-layer robustness—not the credentials of its founders (NVIDIA Blog, 2025).
3. Market Timing and Regulatory Tailwinds
Startups building in emerging spaces—such as carbon capture, generative AI, and decentralized finance—increasingly depend on external tailwinds. According to World Economic Forum projections for 2025, green-tech adoption incentives will boost climate-focused startups by 29%. In such cases, the business idea—the market—the horse—is foundationally critical. Founders can’t out-hustle regulatory alignment or macroeconomic timing.
Still, in sectors characterized by rapid regulatory change (e.g., web3 or AI ethics), founder adaptability is paramount. The FTC’s Q2 2025 report on new compliance protocols for LLM-enabled services reiterates the premium on founders who can integrate evolving compliance into their strategy in real time (FTC News, 2025).
Case Studies: Who Wins in Practice?
Let’s examine how investments actually played out when betting on the jockey versus the horse. The table below illustrates three 2020s startups that succeeded on different merits.
| Startup | Jockey or Horse? | Outcome Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Figma | Horse | Market-defining design platform with sticky UX and clear revenue model. |
| OpenAI | Jockey | Bet on visionary leadership and track record of AI innovation, especially prior to ChatGPT monetization. |
| Flexport | Balanced | Combined founder’s logistics expertise with robust, tech-enabled freight marketplace model. |
These examples demonstrate that while business fundamentals matter immensely, many breakout successes—especially in frontier tech—had their beginnings in the charisma, grit, and vision of their founders.
Data-Backed Investor Sentiment in 2025
VentureBeat’s 2025 investor sentiment survey shows that 58% of VCs now favor founding teams over business models during pre-seed and seed stages. For Series A, this dips to 42%. By Series C, 64% favor metrics and scalability over founder capabilities (VentureBeat AI, 2025).
This supports the growing thesis that founder evaluations remain paramount until companies build significant competitive moats. Kaggle’s investor-algorithm pilot launched in February 2025 adds another layer—scoring startups on 30 human capital markers (resilience, experience, adaptability). Early benchmarks found that startups scoring >80% in founder adaptability had double the funding conversion rate at seed level (Kaggle Blog, 2025).
The Future of Startup Investing: A Hybrid Lens
Going forward, the smartest investors will understand that betting on “either/or” is outdated. In the context of automation, AI commoditization, and global scale, both jockey and horse must align. Startups that scale will need visionary leaders who can pivot across tech cycles and execution partners who can iterate on models with precision.
Accenture’s 2025 prediction emphasizes that “talent-centered startups will increasingly dominate outcome metrics because iterative learning cycles outpace static economic models” (Accenture Future Workforce, 2025). Similarly, McKinsey’s startup capital ROI report identifies top-tier founder capability as equivalent to a 3x valuation multiple at comparable revenue stages (McKinsey, 2025).
In a decade where AI, fintech, and web3 APIs redefine go-to-market timelines, ignoring either side of the equation could be perilous. We’re entering the era of the hybrid thesis: strategic capital that backs top-tier jockeys with horses positioned for compounding advantage.
APA Citations:
- Crunchbase News. (2024). Great People or Great Products?. Retrieved from https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/startup-funding-people-business-considerations-gray-equidam/
- OpenAI. (2025). OpenAI Blog. Retrieved from https://openai.com/blog/
- NVIDIA. (2025). NVIDIA Blog. Retrieved from https://blogs.nvidia.com/
- VentureBeat. (2025). Investor sentiment and AI. Retrieved from https://venturebeat.com/category/ai/
- Kaggle. (2025). Kaggle Blog. Retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/blog
- CNBC. (2025). Markets snapshot. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/markets/
- World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Work. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/focus/future-of-work
- FTC. (2025). New compliance measures. Retrieved from https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases
- McKinsey Global Institute. (2025). Startup ROI metrics. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi
- Accenture. (2025). Future Workforce Insights. Retrieved from https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/future-workforce
Note that some references may no longer be available at the time of your reading due to page moves or expirations of source articles.