Top Highlights

• My dataset showed that the founders of billion-dollar companies were more likely to have PhDs than be dropouts, many of them had entirely non-technical co-founders, fewer than 15 percent went through any accelerator program, many weren’t solving a personal problem, and very few were first to market.
• How many startups had multiple competitors at the time of founding? • How many years of overall work experience did the founders have before starting their company? Was it in the same industry? • Had most founders started another company before? If so, was their previous attempt successful? • How long did it take from when they started to when they...
• they demonstrate that sometimes you can succeed even in the face of data that shows otherwise. We will hear from Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and Affirm, on market creation versus expansion; from Tony Fadell, founder of Nest and the inventor of the iPod, on product differentiation; from Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of Cloudflare, on starting a ...
• My dataset includes any startup that at one point passed the billion-dollar valuation, whether by going public (via an initial public offering, or IPO), by getting acquired, or in private funding rounds—so my study is defined more broadly than just private investor valuations, which is what is usually referred to as a unicorn. Some might argue that...
• PART ONE THE FOUNDERS Ask any venture capitalist what they are looking for when evaluating companies, and strength of “teams” or “founders” is the first thing they’ll mention. And rightfully so. At the very early stages of a company, there’s little more to appraise than the people behind it. Great ideas only get executed by great teams, and the hun...