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.
