Nate Silver isn’t just the polling guru who famously forecasted the states that would elect—and reelect—Barack Obama as president in 2008 and 2012 with stunning accuracy. (He called each of the 50 states in 2012 and 49 of them four years earlier.) He’s also a founder who sold his media business, only to leave a decade later as more than half of his team got the boot. Now that he’s regrouping for the next challenge, he has some advice to share to founders considering whether to sell their own startups.
FiveThirtyEight.com, named after the number of votes in the Electoral College, was founded in 2008 by Silver as a data-driven news site that covered politics, economics, and sports—or, in other words, a blog. It grew out of Silver’s election forecasting, initially anonymously, as a blogger for the progressive site Daily Kos. With a background in sports data, inspired by the groundbreaking work of analyst Bill James, Silver’s political prognostications earned him a reputation as a digital oracle of sorts. Bill Simmons, the former ESPN writer and podcaster who founded The Ringer and later sold it to Spotify, used to refer to Silver as a “witch” when he had him on as a guest.
