What happened after founding?
207 founders with a role on record after they founded, drawn from 439 in the corpus. This cohort is founders who later surfaced in SEC proxy filings — people who reached public-company leadership. The bias runs directly at this question: a founder whose next move went badly is far less likely to appear here at all, so read this as what a successful re-entry looked like, not as the odds of one.
This site tells you that coming back from founding lands you senior, because founders arrive with cross-functional scope. That sentence has been an assertion. Here it is as a count: of the 132 landings whose title carries a rung at all, 120 (91%) are director-level or above.
Titles carrying no rung marker are counted on the chart below but kept out of that denominator: they cannot vote either way, and folding them in would let the claim win by dilution rather than by evidence.
The first operating role recorded after founding, not the best one reached later, which would measure a career rather than a re-entry.
8 years typical, between 3 and 14. Computed over the 141 careers where the founding and the landing both carry dates, filings record years, never months, so this is a year-granular figure over a smaller group than the counts above.
The survivorship warning above is doing more work on this page than on any other. A founder whose next move went badly rarely reaches a proxy statement at all, so this describes what a successful re-entry looked like, not how likely one is.