Super Founders summary

For most people, the idea of a successful startup is synonymous with the rise of Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook from his college dorm room. Or with Steve Jobs, who started Apple out of his garage. But these kinds of stories can also be discouraging to aspiring entrepreneurs  – who might think that maybe they’re not smart enough because they didn’t go to Harvard or that they’re already over-the-hill by age 25.

So let’s clear up some misconceptions. 

First off, Tamaseb’s data shows that age does not matter. The median age for billion-dollar founders was actually thirty-four. And there are countless success stories of unicorns run by older founders – Eric Yuan, for example, was forty-one when he founded Zoom.

A second myth that needs busting is the superstition around the number of cofounders. In Silicon Valley, this notion has become so deep-seated that some venture capital firms will avoid investing in solo founders. The rationale being that having two minds is better than one and it helps divide the workload. But, according to Tamaseb, 20 percent of unicorns were founded by solo founders. And here’s another nugget: power struggles and arguments about vision are two common pitfalls of many startups – problems that don’t exist when there’s only one founder.

Lastly, even though the founders of Facebook, Dell, Wordpress, Snapchat, and WhatsApp are all college dropouts, they’re actually in the minority. Among unicorn founders, 36 percent held a bachelor’s degree, 22 percent an MBA, and about 33 percent held some other advanced degree. Similarly, while many founders went to top notch schools – like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT – just as many graduated from schools that weren’t nationally ranked in the top 100. 

So, ultimately, age, education, and number of cofounders are not predictors of a startup’s success.

But one significant predictor of success that Tamaseb did find was that roughly 60 percent of unicorn founders had previously launched startups. Some of the reasons they were able to eventually achieve success is because their previous experience left them with industry contacts from which to find employees and investors to help get their startups off the ground. And, most importantly, they were more likely to have learned from their mistakes.

Finally, a majority of unicorn founders were natural born builders. Even before college, they were already tinkering. For instance, back in high school, Mark Zuckerberg got together with his classmate Adam D’Angelo to build Synapse, a desktop music player. While they passed up an opportunity to sell the app, both men went on to great success – D’Angelo founded the billion dollar company Quora and Zuckerberg, as you know, launched Facebook.