Super Founders Quotes

“The best thing a founder can do to increase their chances of raising money from top venture capitalists is to assemble an outstanding team and tweak the idea enough to find massive pull from customers.”
― Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

“Then, fundamentally, the question that Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia, would always ask is “Why does this company matter?” That’s a superpowerful question. The other way to ask the question, especially for early-stage investors, is “Why is your company going to be an important part of the future in ten years?”
― Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

“Be so good they can’t ignore you. You are almost always better off making your business better than you are making your pitch better. —MARC ANDREESSEN, CO-FOUNDER OF ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ”
― Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

“What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.”
― Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

“Do not blindly believe that because you were an executive at a high-growth startup or an award-winning academic, the market will automatically embrace your product. Be open-minded and listen to the customers.”
― Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

“Looking at the data, one can see that the best preparation to start a multibillion-dollar company is to create a $10 million–plus company first. The best preparation for that is to start something—anything: a hobby project, a side hustle, maybe a school club. Some Super Founders had as many as four previous $10 million–plus outcomes.”
― Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

“Of course, it’s better to have founded a successful one. Repeat founders who have previously scaled a company, even to a modest size, bring a track record that makes things easier for them the next time they start a company. Of the billion-dollar companies, 70 percent of repeat founders had founded at least one previously successful company—compared to 24 percent in the random group, a significant difference. Those who had founded a fruitful company in the past were much more likely to create a billion-dollar company. This was the strongest difference I observed in my data between the billion-dollar and the random group. Repeat founders were more likely to build billion-dollar startups.”
― Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

“More than domain expertise, what mattered was having work experience at all. It’s the soft skills like managing a team, hiring and firing, raising money, and working the Rolodex of connections that made a difference. Founders”
― Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

“It seems that what is important is having certain soft skills, like the ability to hire a group of talented people, managing them, building and maintaining strategic connections and partnerships across industries, excelling at sales, and thinking about problems in the right way—rather than knowing the technicalities of a specific industry sector. In”
― Ali Tamaseb, Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups