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Super Founders

By: Ali Tamaseb
Narrated by: Dean Temple,Catherine Ho,Jason Culp
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Publisher's Summary

Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar start-ups 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 start-ups, comparing billion-dollar start-ups 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 nontechnical CEO
  • Less than 15 percent 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 start-ups firsthand. 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 start-up successful.

©2021 Ali Tamaseb (P)2021 PublicAffairs

Critic Reviews

“This is perhaps one of the most comprehensive and well researched studies by an insightful venture capitalist ever done on startups and investments. I highly recommend it to all MBA and business students as well as everyone interested in startups and venture capital.” (Ilya Strebulaev, Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business)

"Super Founders dissects startups from every single angle, just like the best investors do. It provides an unparalleled lens for angel investors, VCs, and startup founders to analyze startups, and includes riveting exclusive interviews for anyone interested in understanding how billion-dollar companies happen." (Keith Rabois, general partner at Founders Fund, investor in YouTube, Airbnb, Palantir, Lyft, Yelp, and LinkedIn)

"Ali debunks myths and misconceptions of great founders. His work encourages us to play our own game on our way to becoming the next Super Founder." (Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital, investor in Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, and more)

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Essential for founders

This is an excellent fact based book that is filled with inspirational stories while studded with practical strategies. A must read.

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  • D.
  • 18-06-2023

Great insights and myths debunked

Very interesting dataset, and covers a broad amount of well known and lesser known companies

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Inspiring

Awesome book… really inspiring and another reason to keep pushing forward no matter what, continuing over challenging and pushing till something is created… need more books like this

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Data has the answers

Data driven approach which helps the author illustrate an understanding of both sides of the VC industry. Well worth the read.

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Start-ups

Very inspiring book using factual analysis. It makes me have a rethink about my strategy.

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Alexis review

Get it! Read it! Study it! If you are involved in any way in a tech startup or other, this is your resource for pure facts and knowledge on all aspects. This book changes the game! And puts you in it!

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