Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

Speed of learning is the more important factor; after that are the abilities to be resourceful and to ask the right questions of the right people.

Entrepreneurs need to figure out whether corporations or consumers are looking for their product more strongly and know that pursuing both consumer and enterprise sales channels at the same time, at least when starting out, has rarely led to successful outcomes.

Both low CapEx and high CapEx companies can reach multibillion-dollar outcomes. Although in my dataset the high CapEx billion-dollar startups were on average 25 percent less capital efficient than low CapEx ones, many capital-intensive startups became very successful companies, generating billions of dollars in shareholder value and creating lifesa

My best advice for founders is to treat your company as if you are unable to raise VC money. How would you become profitable? How would you build the product in the first place? Founders would do well to follow the GitHub and Atlassian path. Once you are profitable, fundraising will become one of the easiest parts of the journey rather than the har

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

Despite the tight fundraising, some of the largest companies in my study were founded during the recession. More billion-dollar startups were created in 2007 than in any year before, and the group of companies launched in 2009 has generated the biggest value compared to any other year, with a significant difference.

Warby Parker strengthened its business model by becoming a “triple bottom line” business: its environmental and social impacts are considered alongside its profitability. The company is carbon neutral, and for every pair of glasses it sells, it donates one in a developing country. These practices put Warby Parker in the company of Patagonia, Sevent

founded. When I compared these numbers with those of the random group, I did not observe any significant difference, suggesting that startups were able to achieve billion-dollar status regardless of the type of competition they faced, be it a very powerful incumbent or multiple other startups.

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.

Finally, a smaller group of the billion-dollar companies (about 19 percent) had defensibility based on their brand. Many companies use brand to increase sales and for marketing, but few invest heavily in brand and use it as their main defensibility factor. In the random group, fewer than 7 percent had brand defensibility. This shows that the startu