while doing this research I could not help but notice the lack of diversity among these founding teams.

We should also acknowledge the role that luck, privilege, and access played in the success of many of these founders. Even the smartest people with the best ideas got lucky somewhere. What is important, though, is that these founders kept building until their luck came through.

Based purely on the number of investments in billion-dollar companies, the firms SV Angel, Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, DCVC, and Felicis Ventures came out on top in my study. Some, including Index Ventures, Accel, and Sequoia, also met great success inves

My own data on billion-dollar companies shows that more than 90 percent were venture backed. The rest either were bootstrapped, meaning they did not raise VC funding and grew on their modest profits in the initial years, or were self-financed through founders who had the means to invest in their own companies.

Ideation is an essential part of every startup. There’s a cliché that ideas are a dime a dozen, but executing to get to the right idea is actually key to success. If you are going to dedicate the next ten years of your life to your startup, you will want to spend enough time initially to validate it as a concept worth working on. First look for pro

There are, indeed, many successful billion-dollar startup founders who launched their companies in their early twenties—but that’s not the case for most billion-dollar startup founders. We just hear less about the older ones from the media.

when the founding CEO was non-technical, there was a higher chance that the second founder was non-technical too. This may be because technical founders hang out, study, or work with other technical people with whom they may start a company, and business founders may do the same with business friends. In any case, technical and non-technical founde

The majority of billion-dollar startups did not create a new demand and, in most cases, did not need to wait for the market to mature.

In reality, one in five billion-dollar companies was founded by a solo founder. That’s less common than dual founders (36 percent) or companies with three co-founders (28 percent), but more common than you might think. There are also a few cases where billion-dollar companies were started by more than three people: 12 percent of billion-dollar comp