Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it’s usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be better off if they let their startup do the

it took us eleven years until the company was acquired.

Both technical and non-technical founders succeeded as CEOs (though technical founders had a slight advantage), and solo founders weren’t less likely to build billion-dollar companies. The number of co-founders doesn’t affect success, so feel free to give a recruit the co-founder title to help attract the best core team.

Take the Collison brothers, Patrick and John. As teenagers, the two founded Auctomatic, an auction-management system for power sellers on eBay. They brought the idea to Y Combinator in the winter of 2007 and raised a small seed round from investors including Chris Sacca and Paul Buchheit. Ten months after incorporating, Auctomatic was acquired by a

Koum and Acton had already raised $250,000 in seed funding from a few ex-Yahoo employees, but they saw VC funding as a bailout. Still, Goetz was persistent. He assured the founders that he would act as a strategic advisor, helping them turn WhatsApp into the powerhouse he knew it could be. Eventually, Koum and Acton agreed to take $8 million from S

It is important to keep in mind that painkiller products are more resilient to change.

Andreessen follows this credo: “Invest in strength versus…

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When I compared the data from billion-dollar founders to that of the random group of venture-backed companies, I didn’t find any significant differences in their education level. Founders with specific degrees did not overperform compared to the others (including the dropouts, who were not less or more likely to start a billion-dollar company). Not

Venture capitalists in particular pay a lot of attention to the defensibility of a startup. They want to make sure that when they invest in a company, the next company that comes along with a similar idea is going to have a hard time catching up. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, takes the notion even further: startups, he says, shoul

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