Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
About this ebook
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.
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About the author
Ali Tamaseb is a general partner at DCVC, a highly reputable VC firm in Silicon Valley with over $5 billion under management and investments in multiple billion-dollar startups. He holds several leadership and board positions at companies across the US and globally. Ali was selected one of Business Insider’s top 100 early-stage investors, was an honoree of the British Alumni Award of 2018 by the British Council, and received Imperial College President’s Medal for Outstanding Achievement. Ali and his work have been featured on the BBC and TED, as well as in The Guardian, Forbes, Fortune, Inc.,The Telegraph, among others; and he has given talks and appeared on panels at major events and conferences.
