Super Founders
What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
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Narrated by:
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Dean Temple
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Catherine Ho
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Jason Culp
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By:
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Ali Tamaseb
About this listen
Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar start-ups from the rest - revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false!
Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on start-ups, comparing billion-dollar start-ups with those that failed to become one - 30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few:
- Most unicorn founders had no industry experience
- There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a nontechnical CEO
- Less than 15 percent went through any kind of accelerator program
- Over half had strong competitors when starting - being first to market with an idea does not actually matter
You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar start-ups firsthand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX.
Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a start-up successful.
©2021 Ali Tamaseb (P)2021 PublicAffairsCritic reviews
“This is perhaps one of the most comprehensive and well researched studies by an insightful venture capitalist ever done on startups and investments. I highly recommend it to all MBA and business students as well as everyone interested in startups and venture capital.” (Ilya Strebulaev, Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business)
"Super Founders dissects startups from every single angle, just like the best investors do. It provides an unparalleled lens for angel investors, VCs, and startup founders to analyze startups, and includes riveting exclusive interviews for anyone interested in understanding how billion-dollar companies happen." (Keith Rabois, general partner at Founders Fund, investor in YouTube, Airbnb, Palantir, Lyft, Yelp, and LinkedIn)
"Ali debunks myths and misconceptions of great founders. His work encourages us to play our own game on our way to becoming the next Super Founder." (Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital, investor in Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, and more)
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slow in beginning but gets really good
- By Diana on 04-11-19
By: Jeffrey Bussgang
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Angel
- How to Invest in Technology Startups - Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000
- By: Jason Calacanis
- Narrated by: Jason Calacanis
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Over the past 25 years, Jason Calacanis has made a fortune investing in creators, spotting and helping build and fund a number of successful technology start-ups - investments that have earned him tens of millions of dollars. Now, in this enlightening guide that is sure to become the bible for 21st century investors, Calacanis takes potential angels step by step through his proven method of creating massive wealth: start-ups.
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This audio book is worth millions!!
- By BRAD on 07-21-17
By: Jason Calacanis
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Secrets of Sand Hill Road
- Venture Capital and How to Get It
- By: Scott Kupor, Eric Ries
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Whether you're trying to get a new company off the ground or scale an existing business to the next level, you need to understand how VCs think. In Secrets of Sand Hill Road, Kupor explains exactly how VCs decide where and how much to invest, and how entrepreneurs can get the best possible deal and make the most of their relationships with VCs. Filled with Kupor's firsthand experiences, insider advice, and practical takeaways, Secrets of Sand Hill Road is the guide every entrepreneur needs to turn their startup into the next unicorn.
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As a founder I can highly recommend it
- By Mark on 07-15-19
By: Scott Kupor, and others
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The SaaS Playbook
- Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital
- By: Rob Walling
- Narrated by: Rob Walling
- Length: 4 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Learn how to compete against large competitors and structure your pricing for maximum growth. Discover the four SaaS Cheat Codes that can dramatically accelerate your business's success. Learn how to avoid common mistakes that SaaS founders make and identify the right marketing approaches for your business.
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Solid
- By Phil Williams on 12-14-23
By: Rob Walling
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Start Small, Stay Small
- A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup
- By: Rob Walling
- Narrated by: Rob Walling
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Start Small, Stay Small is a step-by-step guide to launching a self-funded start-up. If you're a desktop, mobile, or web developer, this audiobook is your blueprint to getting your start-up off the ground with no outside investment.
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Can't get past the vocal fry
- By Mahesh on 07-31-21
By: Rob Walling
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Founders at Work
- Stories of Startups' Early Days
- By: Jessica Livingston
- Narrated by: Chelsea Kwoka, full cast
- Length: 21 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
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Wish I had listened to the book sooner.
- By Kindle Customer on 04-11-22
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The Upstarts
- How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
- By: Brad Stone
- Narrated by: Dean Temple
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Ten years ago the idea of getting into a stranger's car or walking into a stranger's home would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it's as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb have ushered in a new era: redefining neighborhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business, and changing the way we travel. In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, another generation of entrepreneurs is using technology to upend convention and disrupt entire industries.
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Are You a Wartime CEO or a Peacetime CEO
- By Dan Collins on 06-14-17
By: Brad Stone
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The Founder's Dilemmas
- By: Noam Wasserman
- Narrated by: Mark Mosely
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin.
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Too much talk on the data
- By Stanley Tan on 10-02-14
By: Noam Wasserman
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Startup CEO
- A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business
- By: Matt Blumberg
- Narrated by: William Michael Redman
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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A definitive audiobook for any CEO - first time or otherwise - of a high-growth company. While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren't - and they're often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general.
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Good, but Too long and a bit corporate-ish
- By Gil Tov Ly on 09-20-16
By: Matt Blumberg
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Build
- An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
- By: Tony Fadell
- Narrated by: Tony Fadell, Roger Wayne
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Tony Fadell led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in 30+ years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia.
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Best guide for start up founders, ever!!!
- By Curly Beard on 05-28-22
By: Tony Fadell
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The Business of Venture Capital (3rd Edition)
- The Art of Raising a Fund, Structuring Investments, Portfolio Management, and Exits,
- By: Mahendra Ramsinghani
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Since its initial publication, The Business of Venture Capital has been hailed as the definitive, most comprehensive book on the subject. Now in its third edition, this market-leading guide explains the multiple facets of the business of venture capital, from raising venture funds, to structuring investments, to generating consistent returns, to evaluating exit strategies.
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Very generic and dated
- By elan mohanty sharma on 08-08-21
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The Startup Owner's Manual
- The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
- By: Steve Blank, Bob Dorf
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups. The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it's taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide. Why? The Startup Owner's Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work.
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Nothing to learn from this book
- By Thomas D. Kehoe on 02-23-22
By: Steve Blank, and others
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The Business of Platforms
- Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power
- By: Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies.
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doesnt teach you much
- By Kenneth on 06-07-20
By: Michael A. Cusumano, and others
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Amazon Unbound
- Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
- By: Brad Stone
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Almost 10 years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his best seller The Everything Store. Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to nearly two trillion dollars.
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Great book and content. Awful narration
- By Asutosh Tripathy on 05-14-21
By: Brad Stone
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The Venture Mindset
- How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth
- By: Ilya Strebulaev, Alex Dang
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Ilya Strebulaev has spent the last two decades at Stanford studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making, and the reasons behind the success and failure of corporate innovation efforts. Alex Dang, a senior leader at McKinsey and Amazon, has seen up close the impact VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can have on a business’ success. Together in The Venture Mindset, they present nine distinct principles that can help anyone looking to transform their business and achieve extraordinary results, no matter the industry.
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Mediocre business book
- By Dan on 10-19-24
By: Ilya Strebulaev, and others
What listeners say about Super Founders
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Placeholder
- 03-05-23
Solid Advice for any one
this is a must read for any entrepreneur or startup who wants solid advice on how to navigate starting a business
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- Thanks Nietzsche
- 07-12-21
big help!
this was exactly what I was looking for! The author does his due diligence and comprises precisely what you want. Enumerates all of the qualities that would result in one being a Founder. Though he does say past performance doesn't predict future success. However for me at least, I'm willing to take that risk. basically, the yacht is going to tell you what are the super Founder's, of billion-dollar startups had in common, what would the market threats, and type of funding each of these startups had. It basically gives you the ability to determine where am I position socially oh, what do I have access to, what do I not or probably won't ever have access to. And then make a choice moving forward. For instance, he talks about the bias against all the founders. Obviously if someone's in extreme introvert, they emigrated from another country and don't have no family and our current country, and they hardly participated in college., obviously they're more positions to be a solo founder, want to just double down on that and then focus our resources on other things like creating go the technical expertise you might need, or merely cording the attention of the right VC people. Where is someone who is the opposite of all those things is probably much better not focusing so much on Talent or or at least developed in the technical domain expertise and would be better positions fighting other co-founders. Ultimately just depends on which works best for other people. That's why the data so is such a wide variance.
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- Jonas Tressel
- 12-18-22
Motivating for a Young Founder
Reading this book as a young founder with limited experience in my vertical, gives me a lot more confidence to know that there’s others out there like me. The statistics in this book make things a lot more black and white about what matters when being a founder and what doesn’t. Although this book isn’t to serve as a step by step guide to founding a company, it provides great general guidance of what to look out for when involved in a startup. One of my favorite startup books I’ve read to date.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-31-21
Phenomenal
The interviews with the super founders are so in-depth, and the knowledge shared is priceless. Love it. Would recommend it to any entrepreneur.
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- Anonymous User
- 05-03-22
Must read
The book is a must read for every new entrepreneur. It dispels so many myths that may stop you on your road to success.
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- Derek
- 03-17-23
Absolutely amazing!!
Great listen about the world of super founders! Unbiased data and a lot of research, but somehow the author turns it into a story about tenacity, luck, and amazing individuals who love to build!
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- Anonymous User
- 09-30-24
Great book on startups
This book gets really good around chapter 4 and stays good up through the end.
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- Gold Darr Hood
- 08-27-21
A useful dive into the data behind the ideal
It is very striking that most VCs say they invest in founders, but in this data driven economy, this work is one of the first deep survey explorations into the founders behind billion dollar companies. I am very appreciative of the detail, objectivity, and clear statements of assumptions and context limitations included. Most definitely worth reading/listening to whether you are an investor, founder, or curious soul.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Alex Lawrence
- 04-13-22
Go for it
Must read to dispel myths on super founders. Go for it!!!!You will like it.
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- Jodie
- 11-26-22
Super informative
Great to hear stories backed by data. Very encouraging to people interested in entrepreneurship and business
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