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.