Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar StartupsHardcover (2024)

Description

Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false!

Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few:

• Most unicorn founders had no industry experience;
• There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO;
• Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program;
• Over half had strong competitors when starting—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.

Product Details

About the Author

Ali Tamaseb is a partner at DCVC, a highly reputable VC firm in Silicon Valley with over $2 billion under management and investments in over ten billion-dollar startups. He holds several leadership and board positions at companies across the U.S. and globally. Ali was an honoree of the British Alumni Award of 2018 by the British Council, and Imperial College President's Medal for Outstanding Achievement. Ali and his work has been featured in BBC, TED, Guardian, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., The Telegraph, among others, and he has given talks and appeared on panels at major events and conferences.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Correlation Is Not Causation: A Note on Methods and Statistics 7

Part 1 The Founders 11

1 Myths Around Founders' Backgrounds 13

Founding a Billion-Dollar Startup at Age Twenty-One: Interview With Henrique Dubugras of Brex 26

2 Myths Around Founders' Education 31

A Professor Who Built Multiple Billion-Dollar Startups: Interview With Arie Belldegrun of Kite Pharma and Allogene 38

3 Myths Around Founders' Work Experience 43

Founders Who Built a $2 Billion Cancer Company Without Any Medical Background: Interview With Nat Turner of Flatiron Health 53

4 The Super Founder 59

A Founder Who Met Success on the Second Try: Interview With Max Mullen of Instacart 70

Part 2 The Company 75

5 The Origin Story 77

A Billion-Dollar Startup That Originated at a Large Tech Company: Interview With Neha Narkhede of Confluent 83

6 Pivots 87

7 What and Where? 95

A Billion-Dollar Move Out of Silicon Valley into Denver: Interview With Rachel Carlson Of Guild Education 104

8 Product 113

A Founder Who Always Built Highly Differentiated Products: Interview With Tony Fadell of Nest and Apple 123

9 Market 129

A Founder Who Did Both Market Creation and Expansion: Interview With Max Levchin of PayPal and Affirm 136

10 Market Timing 143

A Billion-Dollar Startup with Perfect Market Timing: Interview With Mario Schlosser Of Oscar Health 148

11 Competition 153

Competing Against Strong Incumbents: Interview With Eric Yuan of Zoom 161

12 The Defensibility Factor 167

Part 3 The Fundraising 173

13 Venture Capital Versus Bootstrapping 175

A $7.5 Billion Company That Was Bootstrapped for the First Five Years: Interview With Tom Preston-Werner OF GitHub 187

14 Bull Market Versus Bear Market 193

A Billion-Dollar Company That Started in the Depth of the Recession: Interview With Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare 198

15 Capital Efficiency 203

16 Angels and Accelerators 211

A Prolific Angel Investor Turned VC: Interview With Keith Rabois of Founders Fund 219

17 VC Investors 225

An Investor in Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, Zipline, and More: Interview With Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital 238

18 Fundraising 247

An Investor in Facebook, SpaceX, Stripe, and More: Interview With Peter Thiel 262

What to Remember 267

Acknowledgments 273

Notes 277

Index 285