Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

among venture-backed companies, it’s often preferred to have a shot at reaching a multibillion-dollar outcome—and fast—even if it means taking risks that could kill the business.

We’ve actually raised every dollar from San Francisco except for a very small amount from New York. I don’t think the capital needs to be where your office is. I actually think it was very useful that we were not in Silicon Valley in terms of fundraising. I think founders can accidentally waste an inordinate amount of time trying to build relations

In terms of producing successful entrepreneurs, a university’s rank seems less important than its culture and location.

Root Insurance handles car insurance through an app, bypassing the usual insurance agent or the lengthy process of submitting information online and getting back a vague quote. Rather than asking customers to send in historical information, Root’s app observes the way someone drives, using the sensors in their smartphone. It gives them an insurance

As an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to make decisions, and you can’t be a perfectionist.

Overall, booms and busts in the economy, including in the stock market, have an impact both on the amounts invested by VC firms and on valuations, with later-stage startups getting hit harder. However, the impact is not catastrophic. While startups find it harder to raise capital and find themselves raising at more modest valuations during these ti

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.

In general, I don’t like [investing in] founders from the industry. I typically avoid them like the plague. I actually prefer people who are much more naive. I think you can always hire experts later, and mostly industry expertise teaches you what you can’t do or shouldn’t do, not how to do it. And you don’t ask enough why questions, like, “Why is

It would be impossible to collect data on how many of the billion-dollar companies pivoted, or how those pivots compare to those of the group of random startups, given that many startup stories include only the last idea that worked, often rewriting the history. What is clear, however, is that some billion-dollar companies succeeded only because th