Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

Founders should decide how much to raise based on how much money they need to reach the next set of milestones. Startups have many layers of risk stacked on top of each other. Leo Polovets, managing partner at Susa Ventures, calls startups a “bundle of risk.”6 These risk layers could be as broad as “product risk,” but ideally the risk layers should

Here are a few key takeaways: • There are a lot of myths about founders. Forget them. Founders of billion-dollar companies started at any age—half of them were thirty-four or older—and came from all kinds of backgrounds. Age was a nonfactor.

Having founded a company, even one that doesn’t become super successful, increased the likelihood of founding another one worth a billion dollars or more. Of course, it’s better to have founded a successful one. Repeat founders who have previously scaled a company, even to a modest size, bring a track record that makes things easier for them the ne

Credit Karma became a dominant player in the space, gathering over eighty million users, and in 2020 it was acquired by Intuit, a public company in the financial software space, for $7.1 billion.

I don’t believe at all in market timing. This is one of my arguably debatable, contrarian views. Timing is always an excuse in my mind. It’s the goal of an entrepreneur to match the company’s trajectory against the real world. When a company doesn’t do that, or a founder doesn’t do it, it just means the founder is not very good.

For the aspiring investor, the takeaway is to invest in a portfolio of people, and to invest in them back-to-back in their various endeavors. Take a people-centric view rather than thinking about a portfolio of companies.

Every company that a VC invests in needs to have the potential to return at least the fund. If you raise VC money, this calculation will determine the investor’s expectation and will establish at what point they would be happy for you to sell the company.

It is also important to build trust during the fundraising process. One of the things that I think is a little deceptive is if you only show me the good data and I have to dig for the bad data. But then how do we develop a good working dynamic after the round closes? You want to have a relationship with your investor where you can talk about bad ne

Paul Graham wrote a great blog post I really love about being relentlessly resourceful. I think that’s an absolute ingredient. I think IQ is pretty important. You need to see things other people just don’t see. Ultimately, the best description of what I’m looking for is people who can navigate this intellectual maze.