Super Founders : What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

Using a data-driven approach, Super Founders is a “must-read” (Eric Yuan, founder and CEO, Zoom) examination of what differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest
 
As a venture capitalist, Ali Tamaseb has amassed perhaps the largest dataset ever on startups. He compared billion-dollar startups with those that failed to make the grade, using 30,000 data points encompassing nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, their university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more.

He also conducted exclusive interviews with the founders of billion-dollar startups like Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Kite Pharma, and GitHub, and investors in Facebook, Airbnb, DoorDash, LinkedIn, Stripe, and more, including Peter Thiel, Elad Gil, Sequoia Capital, and Founders Fund.

What he found looked far different than he expected. For example:

• Most unicorn founders had no directly relevant industry experience

• Solo founders and non-technical CEOs had no disadvantage

• Less than 15 percent went through any kind of accelerator program

• Over half faced established competitors—being first to market with an idea does not actually matter

Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively

successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.