Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

If there is one takeaway from this book, it should be that the path to a billion-dollar startup often begins with a bug for creating. The best preparation for starting a wildly successful company is starting a company. If you have never started a company, the best preparation for doing so is to start something, maybe a club or side hustle.

Startups still got funded and billion-dollar startups were still created in recessions, albeit with reduced dollar amounts and valuations. While investors prefer capital-efficient startups, some capital-intensive…

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Many billion-dollar founders had already started successful or unsuccessful companies before they created the billion-dollar one. Yesterday’s Super Founders—those who had founded at least one previous company that reached a certain scale and a modest outcome, arbitrarily set at $10 million–plus annual revenues or an exit of that size—were a lot mor

This journey is full of ups and downs. You may get to your billion-dollar outcome on your first try, but it’s more likely to happen on your second, third, or tenth. For the aspiring VC, my recommendation is to take a people-centric view: create a portfolio of people rather than companies. Invest in people back-to-back in their various endeavors.

We should also acknowledge the role that luck, privilege, and access played in the success of many of these founders. Even the smartest people with the best ideas got lucky somewhere. What is important, though, is that these founders kept building until their luck came through.

Venture capital has an unintuitive math behind it, and the power laws of startup outcomes dictate why VCs prefer risky startups with massive potential to lower-risk startups with less perceived upside. The fund size of the VC firm you are raising money from dictates the minimum exit…

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Many successful founders become angel investors, and they tend to have a higher chance of spotting future billion-dollar companies. When fundraising, how you pitch, how beautifully crafted your deck is, and how comprehensive your materials are carry less importance than the backgrounds of the team members. Think deeply…

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In your pitch deck, less is more. Use your energy, money, and equity to convince the best people to join you and to sign up customers. Spend your time putting your company in a better position so that VCs can’t…

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Competition is good, or at least not an extinction risk; over half of billion-dollar startups competed with large incumbents at the time of founding. It’s good to compete with incumbents or compete in fragmented markets; they are easier to beat than a highly funded startup with the same idea. Remember Zoom’s founder telling the story of competing a