Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

by Ali Tamaseb

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Tamaseb, a DCVC partner, hand-collected 30,000 data points on every US billion-dollar startup founded since 2005 and compared them to a control group of random startups to test common myths. He finds that most unicorn founders had no industry experience, solo founders do fine, first-mover advantage is largely a myth, and the single strongest predictor is a founder's prior track record of starting things - overturning much received VC wisdom.

Published:: 2021
Pages:: 384

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In the Conversation

In this collection, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups references 4 other books.

It draws on Zero to One, The Lean Startup and The Innovator's Dilemma.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

What This Book Draws On

The books Tamaseb references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Tests Thiel's Zero to One claims about monopoly, market size, and being first empirically against the unicorn dataset, finding first-mover advantage far weaker than Thiel implies while confirming his points about secrets and market structure

References

Zero to One

by Peter Thiel

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Evaluates Ries's Lean Startup methodology against the data, finding that pivots and MVPs correlate with unicorn outcomes but that many billion-dollar companies skipped the classic lean playbook entirely

References

The Lean Startup

by Eric Ries

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References Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma when analyzing whether unicorns disrupt incumbents from below or attack established markets head-on, finding more direct competition than the disruption frame predicts

References

The Innovator's Dilemma

by Clayton Christensen

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Engages Gladwell's Outliers 10,000-hour thesis by testing whether domain expertise predicts unicorn founding - and finds, surprisingly, that most super founders lacked industry experience

References

Outliers

by Malcolm Gladwell

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Intellectual Lineage

How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.

Builds on (2 layers deep)

Directly cites

Zero to One

The Lean Startup

The Innovator's Dilemma

Outliers

2 steps back

The Innovator's Solution

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Unexpected Connections

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