Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

Competing against multiple incumbents was the most common scenario, followed by going into a fragmented market. However, none of these types of competition increased the likelihood of success. Startups going after other highly funded startups were an exception: they had lower chances of becoming billion-dollar companies. Basically copying the idea

It is important to keep in mind that painkiller products are more resilient to change.

I don’t think there is enough data to support a hypothesis of whether or not a bear market cycle leads to greater outcomes, however. For example, the success of the cohort of billion-dollar companies started in 2008 and 2009 could be attributed to the proliferation of smartphones and a shift to cloud computing.

Kafka is, of course, probably the most successful open-source project that came out of LinkedIn, but we did maybe close to a hundred open-source tools of all kinds. So it’s mostly for hiring. LinkedIn was building a brand to hire top engineers. We wanted to open-source it because we knew that this wasn’t just LinkedIn’s problem. There was a broader

Looking at the data, one can see that the best preparation to start a multibillion-dollar company is to create a $10 million–plus company first. The best preparation for that is to start something—anything: a hobby project, a side hustle, maybe a school club.

One reason why funding follows the markets is that venture capitalists themselves rely on funding from limited partners, the entities that invest in VC firms. LPs need to keep their portfolios balanced between public market securities, like hedge funds, and private markets, like venture capital. When the stock market crashes, their venture capital

I am very long on tech-enabled services—technology and products for the everyman and the everywoman. I think San Francisco creates an echo chamber that leads folks to believe that they should build products and services for the people they know and spend time with, their high-income friends. I think there’s a truism to the fact that you build produ

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Clubhouse is an audio-only social network where people can listen in to live chats and discuss various topics, like tech or sports. Started in 2020, the company got millions of users and a billion-dollar valuation in less than a year. It looks like an overnight success, but Davison and Seth had launched various consumer social apps over the previou