Super Founders

What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

By: Ali Tamaseb

Narrated by: Dean Temple, Catherine Ho, Jason Culp

Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar start-ups 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 start-ups, comparing billion-dollar start-ups 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 nontechnical CEO
• Less than 15 percent 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

You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar start-ups firsthand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX.

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 start-up successful.

©2021 Ali Tamaseb (P)2021 PublicAffairs

Critic reviews

“This is perhaps one of the most comprehensive and well researched studies by an insightful venture capitalist ever done on startups and investments. I highly recommend it to all MBA and business students as well as everyone interested in startups and venture capital.” (Ilya Strebulaev, Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business)

"Super Founders dissects startups from every single angle, just like the best investors do. It provides an unparalleled lens for angel investors, VCs, and startup founders to analyze startups, and includes riveting exclusive interviews for anyone interested in understanding how billion-dollar companies happen." (Keith Rabois, general partner at Founders Fund, investor in YouTube, Airbnb, Palantir, Lyft, Yelp, and LinkedIn)

"Ali debunks myths and misconceptions of great founders. His work encourages us to play our own game on our way to becoming the next Super Founder." (Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital, investor in Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, and more)

Solid Advice for any one

this is a must read for any entrepreneur or startup who wants solid advice on how to navigate starting a business

big help!

this was exactly what I was looking for! The author does his due diligence and comprises precisely what you want. Enumerates all of the qualities that would result in one being a Founder. Though he does say past performance doesn't predict future success. However for me at least, I'm willing to take that risk. basically, the yacht is going to tell you what are the super Founder's, of billion-dollar startups had in common, what would the market threats, and type of funding each of these startups had. It basically gives you the ability to determine where am I position socially oh, what do I have access to, what do I not or probably won't ever have access to. And then make a choice moving forward. For instance, he talks about the bias against all the founders. Obviously if someone's in extreme introvert, they emigrated from another country and don't have no family and our current country, and they hardly participated in college., obviously they're more positions to be a solo founder, want to just double down on that and then focus our resources on other things like creating go the technical expertise you might need, or merely cording the attention of the right VC people. Where is someone who is the opposite of all those things is probably much better not focusing so much on Talent or or at least developed in the technical domain expertise and would be better positions fighting other co-founders. Ultimately just depends on which works best for other people. That's why the data so is such a wide variance.

Motivating for a Young Founder

Reading this book as a young founder with limited experience in my vertical, gives me a lot more confidence to know that there’s others out there like me. The statistics in this book make things a lot more black and white about what matters when being a founder and what doesn’t. Although this book isn’t to serve as a step by step guide to founding a company, it provides great general guidance of what to look out for when involved in a startup. One of my favorite startup books I’ve read to date.

Phenomenal

The interviews with the super founders are so in-depth, and the knowledge shared is priceless. Love it. Would recommend it to any entrepreneur.

Must read

The book is a must read for every new entrepreneur. It dispels so many myths that may stop you on your road to success.

Absolutely amazing!!

Great listen about the world of super founders! Unbiased data and a lot of research, but somehow the author turns it into a story about tenacity, luck, and amazing individuals who love to build!

Great book on startups

This book gets really good around chapter 4 and stays good up through the end.

A useful dive into the data behind the ideal

It is very striking that most VCs say they invest in founders, but in this data driven economy, this work is one of the first deep survey explorations into the founders behind billion dollar companies. I am very appreciative of the detail, objectivity, and clear statements of assumptions and context limitations included. Most definitely worth reading/listening to whether you are an investor, founder, or curious soul.

Go for it

Must read to dispel myths on super founders. Go for it!!!!You will like it.

Super informative

Great to hear stories backed by data. Very encouraging to people interested in entrepreneurship and business