Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

by Ali Tamaseb

Overview

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.

 
You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. 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 startup successful.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541768420
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	404,277
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

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

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

Editorial 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

"Ali Tamaseb offers an extraordinary look at the success and failure of startups coupled with inside stories and interviews with some of the best startup leaders. A must-read."—Eric Yuan, Founder and CEO, Zoom

“It’s heartening to see initiatives and studies like this. A data-driven effort to understand the success and failure of startups has been lacking and this book is doing exactly that."—Ron Conway – Founder of SV Angel, Angel Investor in Google, Facebook, Airbnb and more

“Conventional wisdom about what leads to startup success abounds. With a vast dataset, real rigor, and fresh insight, Tamaseb validates some truisms and debunks many others. A must-read for aspiring founders and venture investors!”—Tom Eisenmann, Harvard Business School professor and author of Why Startups Fail

"Super Founders challenges founders, entrepreneurs, and investors to rethink what matters most when you’re building a business. These insightful stories help break down bias along the startup journey. It's a great guide I wish I had earlier in my career.”—Tony Fadell, Future Shape principal, Nest founder, iPod inventor, and iPhone co-inventor

From the Publisher

2021-03-09
A successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist offers a grand tour of the startups now worth billions.

Tamaseb is an articulate and influential advocate for the complex world of startup culture, and his education, experience, and access all come into play here. Many books in this realm tend toward cautionary tales, but Tamaseb offers an intriguing combination of history, data, theory, economics, and thoughtful interviews with significant founders and investors, creating a narrative that is less tech history and more playbook for the power players that come after. The author focuses only on companies valued at more than $1 billion, which, despite what sensational media attention may suggest, are not common. “Billion-dollar startups—or ‘unicorns,’ a term coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee—are, as their name indicates, relatively rare. They make up less than 0.1 percent of startups.” Featuring contributions from such boldface names as Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom, and investor Peter Thiel, the book is as organized and clear-cut as a textbook, but Tamaseb has a personable and generous writing style and the grace to step aside to highlight other voices. In the first third, the author engages in some necessary myth-busting about startups and their founders, using data to move the narrative beyond the stereotype of a couple of genius friends working 24/7 in their parents’ garage. Next, Tamaseb examines the origin stories of well-known corporations like PayPal and Airbnb as well as companies that are less familiar publicly but no less successful. Later, the author pivots to business models, the timing of bringing a product to market, and how to deal with competition. Finally, he lands on the juicy issue of fundraising, mostly focusing on the nebulous world of venture capital and angel investing, which will be mind-expanding for budding entrepreneurs and largely irrelevant to general readers.

A well-meaning and often stirring insider’s look at startup success and lessons to be learned from their journeys.

Kirkus Reviews