The Founders 100 ETF

Somewhere in an asset management conference room, someone pitched this: 'What if we could turn all that research about founder-led companies outperforming the market into an ETF?' And just like that, the Founders 100 ETF was born. Ticker: FFF. Because apparently 'Founder Factor Fund' needs to be tripled for emphasis.

The fund launched December 10, 2025, entering a graveyard of predecessor products that tried this same thesis. The timing is either prescient or concerning, depending on your view of whether 'founder-led' is an actual investment factor or just a way to describe companies run by people whose names you recognise from magazine covers.

Full disclosure: as a founder myself, I have a personal stake in believing this thesis is true. There's something deeply validating about academic research confirming that people like me add measurable value. So, take my enthusiasm with the appropriate grain of salt.

The Academic Foundation

To be fair, there's substantial research supporting the founder premium thesis. A 2009 study in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis found that an equal-weighted strategy investing in founder-CEO firms from 1993 to 2002 earned abnormal returns of 4.4% annually above the market. Bain & Company research showed that an index of Fortune 500 companies where the founder remains 'deeply involved' outperformed the rest by 3.1x over 15 years. A Purdue study found founder-led S&P 500 companies generate 31% more patents and create more valuable innovations.

The logic is intuitive. Founders have skin in the game: their personal wealth is tied to the company's success. They think long-term because they're not worried about getting fired in three years. They have 'moral authority' to make tough decisions that professional managers might avoid. They know the business inside and out. Andreessen Horowitz has been vocal about preferring founder-CEOs in their portfolio companies for exactly these reasons.

But here's the thing about academic factors: they have a nasty habit of diminishing once everyone starts trading them.

The Graveyard of Predecessors

The Founders 100 ETF isn't entering virgin territory. Global X launched the Founder-Run Companies ETF (BOSS) in February 2017, tracking the Solactive U.S. Founder-Run Companies Index. It was an elegant thesis wrapped in a decent expense ratio (0.45%), equal-weighting ~100 companies where a founder serves as CEO.

BOSS closed in November 2023 with just $6.4 million in assets. For context, that's less than what some Magnificent Seven stocks move in a single minute of trading. The fund worked: it held companies like Nvidia, Palantir, AppLovin, and other founder-led success stories. But nobody cared enough to invest in it.

First Republic launched its FRC Founders Index in 2019, boasting about outperforming the S&P 500 by 46% in its first year. Of course, First Republic itself is no longer with us (seized by regulators in 2023 and sold to JPMorgan), which adds a certain irony to any discussion of 'founder-led' durability. The index remains, but the mutual fund that tracked it was never available to retail investors anyway.

So, the Founders 100 ETF enters a space where the thesis is sound, the research is robust, and the predecessors are largely dead. An auspicious beginning.

What We Know About FFF

The fund is actively managed by Founder Funds, a registered investment adviser that appears to have been created specifically for this product. The strategy invests in the 'top 100 U.S. Founder-Led Companies' using what they call the 'Founder Factor' approach. It's growth-focused, rebalanced quarterly, and built for 'long-term investors willing to accept higher volatility.'

The management fee is 0.75%, which sits in active-ETF-trying-to-be-smart territory. That's meaningfully higher than BOSS was (0.45%) but not outrageous for an actively managed thematic fund. The 'rules-based process for most holdings, complemented by discretionary picks like founder-led IPOs' language suggests they're trying to have it both ways: systematic enough to be defensible, flexible enough to chase recent IPOs.
The ticker FFF presumably stands for something like 'Founder Factor Fund' or 'Founder-Focused Fund,' though I prefer to imagine it means 'Finally, a Fund for Founders' or perhaps 'Founders, Founders, Founders!' shouted with increasing enthusiasm.

The Bull Case

The academic research is real. Founder-led companies have demonstrated superior innovation, better capital allocation, and stronger long-term returns across multiple studies and time periods. The thesis makes intuitive sense: aligned incentives, long-term thinking, and deep institutional knowledge should produce better outcomes.

The current market is rich with founder-led companies that have generated extraordinary returns. Nvidia (Jensen Huang), Tesla (Elon Musk), Amazon (Bezos-era and Jassy's continuation), Meta (Zuckerberg), Palantir (Karp/Thiel)... the list of founder-led outperformers over the past decade reads like a Hall of Fame roster.

Active management could add value by identifying founder-led IPOs early and avoiding founder-led companies where the founder has become more liability than asset. Not all founders age gracefully into their CEO roles, and an active manager can theoretically distinguish between Jensen Huang's continued brilliance and... well, other situations.

The Bear Case

First, there's survivorship bias in the research. We celebrate the founders who stayed and succeeded while forgetting the ones whose continued involvement drove their companies into the ground. The studies that show founder outperformance are measuring founders who remained in leadership positions long enough to be studied, not founders who were pushed out for good reason.

Second, the factor may be getting arbitraged away. Once everyone 'knows' that founder-led companies outperform, the market prices that expectation into founder-led stocks. The premium diminishes or disappears entirely. This is the curse of published research becoming investment strategies.

Third, there's key-person risk on steroids. Your thesis literally depends on specific humans remaining in specific roles. When the founder leaves, gets sick, dies, or simply loses interest, what happens to your 'founder premium'? The fund has to sell into that transition, likely at exactly the wrong time.

Fourth, governance concerns cut both ways. Founders often maintain control through dual class share structures that let them ignore other shareholders. That's great when Jensen Huang is ignoring short-term pressure to pursue AI supremacy. It's less great when a founder uses their control to pursue vanity projects or resist needed change.

Finally, BOSS's closure should give pause. If this thesis is so compelling, why couldn't it attract assets? Either the thesis doesn't resonate with actual investors, or it's harder to market than it should be. The new fund is presumably betting on better timing or better marketing, but those are not high-conviction reasons to invest.

The Magnificent Seven Problem

Here's what's really interesting about founder-led investing in 2025: you're largely just recreating the Magnificent Seven with extra steps. Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Amazon (kind of), and Alphabet all fit the founder-led or founder-influenced definition. Apple is the notable exception (though Jobs's influence arguably still permeates).

So, what does a founder-focused ETF actually give you that you can't get from holding QQQ or an equal-weight tech fund? Maybe some smaller founder-led companies that aren't in the mega-caps. Maybe some founder-led firms in non-tech sectors like Berkshire Hathaway (Buffett) or Blackstone (Schwarzman). But the core of the portfolio is likely to look suspiciously familiar.

The counterargument is that equal-weighting these companies, rather than cap-weighting them, provides a different exposure profile. And adding the 'long tail' of smaller founder-led companies diversifies beyond the obvious names. But at 0.75%, you're paying a meaningful premium for that differentiation.

Why This One's Personal

I'll admit to a bias here. As someone who has built something from scratch, the founder thesis resonates on a level that goes beyond the academic research. There's a particular kind of obsession that founders bring to their companies. We remember every early customer, every near-death experience, every decision that seemed impossible at the time. That institutional memory matters in ways that don't show up on balance sheets.

The 'moral authority' point from the research hits home. When you've mortgaged your house, missed your kids' birthdays, and bet everything on an idea, you earn a certain credibility with your team that hired executives simply cannot replicate. You can ask people to do hard things because they've watched you do harder things. That's not quantifiable, but it's real.

I'm planning to bring this research to my bosses, actually. Not as an investment recommendation necessarily, but as a philosophical point about how we think about leadership and long-term value creation. The data on founder-led outperformance is compelling enough to merit discussion at the strategic level. If nothing else, it's a useful framework for thinking about what makes companies durable.

Whether that translates to 'buy FFF' is a different question. But the underlying concept deserves airtime in conversations about what we value in management and governance.

Final Verdict: Thesis Right, Product Uncertain, Concept Worth Discussing

The research supporting founder-led outperformance is genuine. The logic is sound. The problem is that good theses don't always make good ETFs. BOSS proved that you can be conceptually correct and still fail to gather assets.

The Founders 100 ETF is betting that active management and better timing will succeed where passive indexing failed. Maybe. The IPO-chasing flexibility could add value if the team identifies the next founder-led success story early. Or it could lead to buying hot IPOs at inflated prices because they fit the founder narrative.

At 0.75%, FFF is priced like an active fund that needs to prove itself. It doesn't have the track record yet, the asset base yet, or the differentiation from holding QQQ + a few value names yet. What it has is a compelling story, solid academic backing, and the fresh launch optimism that every new ETF enjoys.

But here's what I'll say: regardless of whether FFF succeeds as a product, the founder premium research is worth understanding. It has implications for how we evaluate management teams, structure incentives, and think about corporate governance. That's a conversation worth having even if you never buy a single share of this ETF.

I'll be watching to see how the portfolio is actually constructed and whether it offers genuine differentiation from simply buying the Magnificent Seven and calling it 'founder exposure.' The ticker FFF at least makes for good headlines. And for founders like me, it's nice to see our particular brand of obsession validated by the data, even if the ETF wrapper remains unproven.