Super Founders

Ali Tamaseb, a venture capitalist at DCVC, published this book on 18 May 2021 with the subtitle What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups. Its method is the argument. Tamaseb assembled what the publisher describes as perhaps the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing companies that reached a billion-dollar valuation with those that did not, across about thirty thousand data points covering the number of competitors, the size of the market, the founder's age, the ranking of the founder's university, the quality of the investors, the time taken to raise money and much else. He supplemented the data with interviews with founders of large companies and with well-known investors. The findings the publisher highlights cut against the received wisdom of the industry: most founders of billion-dollar companies had no directly relevant industry experience, solo founders and non-technical chief executives were at no disadvantage, fewer than fifteen per cent went through an accelerator, and more than half faced established competitors, so being first to market did not in fact matter. The book is pitched at founders and investors as a guide rather than as an academic study, and its endorsements come from that world.

Written from the publisher's page for the book at PublicAffairs, part of Hachette Book Group.

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