Name: Super Founders
Rating: 4.5 (233 reviews)
Author: Ali Tamaseb

What’s in it for me? Find out what really matters for a startup’s success.

There are a lot of common assumptions about what it takes to build a successful billion-dollar startup – frequently known as “unicorns.”

One myth is that a founder has to be an Ivy League dropout, like Mark Zuckerberg. Another is that, like Apple, a unicorn has to have cofounders handling the technical and the visionary aspects of the work.

However, 30,000 data points collected since 2017 say that, actually, there were more founders with PhDs than dropouts; that contrary to popular wisdom, only 15 percent of unicorns participated in an accelerator program. And, rather than being first-to-market, many billion-dollar projects were built on ideas that failed in the past.

In these blinks, you’ll also learn about the benefits of bootstrapping; why venture capitalists prefer risk; and the best predictor of startup success. So let’s dive deep into these blinks, and learn which factors really drive a startup’s astronomical rise.

Don’t let preconceptions and myths hold you back from your dreams.

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.

Understand the market and understand why your idea is different.

Back in 2012, cryptocurrency wasn’t really a thing. Bitcoin was only four years old and trading at under five dollars. It was a concept most people had never even heard of. But Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, the founders of Coinbase, saw an opportunity. At the time, Bitcoin was accepted by only a few sites and trading with it required a high level of technical know-how. Hackers loved it! And, eventually, everyday users would need a safe place to store and trade their coins.

Sometimes the counterintuitive move pays off.

Everyone loves a new idea. There’s something magical about seeing something that hasn’t been done before. VC investors, however, think differently. For them, it’s not the novelty of seeing something new, but rather, they don’t like investing in ideas that have been tried before because those ideas have already failed.

If your product is good enough, you don’t necessarily have to worry about funding.

According to Tamaseb, 90 percent of the unicorns in his study were VC-backed. That’s because VC investment and startups are a marriage made in heaven, with both aiming to move quickly toward their goal of a billion dollar payday. And to get there, most VCs would rather back a risky but potentially massive startup over one with low risk and steady growth.

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