Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

Some startups manage to make it work with either two technical founders or two non-technical founders.

If you’re a founder, it’s important that you foresee and understand the external factors that affect a company’s timing: inflection points, enabling technologies, changes in regulations, new market segments, and other fundamental behavior shifts. These are the things that have led to the success of many billion-dollar companies, rather than their b

The value of a Super Founder is their ability to scale a company to a certain size and outcome, and to do it more than once.

There are, indeed, many successful billion-dollar startup founders who launched their companies in their early twenties—but that’s not the case for most billion-dollar startup founders. We just hear less about the older ones from the media.

Many would advise founders to take relationship-building meetings with investors regardless of whether you are actively fundraising or not. I disagree. VCs see every interaction as a pitch, and it only takes one less than impressive interaction to permanently create a negative impression. Don’t go to all VC events to build friendships with them. Be

of the hundreds of thousands of new businesses that are formed every year in the United States, fewer than ten thousand receive any venture funding whatsoever, which represents less than 1 percent of all new companies created. Of those, fewer than 1 percent become billion-dollar companies.

We’ve actually raised every dollar from San Francisco except for a very small amount from New York. I don’t think the capital needs to be where your office is. I actually think it was very useful that we were not in Silicon Valley in terms of fundraising. I think founders can accidentally waste an inordinate amount of time trying to build relations

It would be impossible to collect data on how many of the billion-dollar companies pivoted, or how those pivots compare to those of the group of random startups, given that many startup stories include only the last idea that worked, often rewriting the history. What is clear, however, is that some billion-dollar companies succeeded only because th

Almost all the founders of billion-dollar companies are builders. Going back to high school or even younger, many of them started side projects, student clubs, or even companies.