Super Founders - by Ali Tamaseb (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Every VC is chasing a unicorn-those billion dollar companies that fundamentally change their industries, and every entrepreneur certainly wants to become one. For Super Founders, author Ali Tamaseb gathered and analyzed 40,000 data points about the 200+ unicorns founded since 2005 and found out what these billion dollar companies and their founders actually looked like. And you'll be surprised by what he discovered. Half of unicorn founders are over 35. Most founders don't have any directly relevant work experience in the industry they're disrupting. There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder. Sixty percent of billion dollar companies are started by repeat entrepreneurs, many of whom already have at least one $50M+ exit under their belt. And over half of unicorns were competing with multiple incumbents at the time of their founding. What we thought we knew about these companies doesn't turn out to be true, which has serious implications for both the kinds of startups that get funding and the for the kinds of people who decide to start companies in the first place. Super Founders gives readers an unprecedented look not just at what the data tells us about the world's most successful startups and the people who create them, but also at those companies and founders themselves, many of which are not well-known among the general public. A blend of data, analysis, stories and exclusive interviews, the book is a paradigm-shifting guide for entrepreneurs and the investment community. You may look more like a Super Founder than you think!"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

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.