Ro's Recz

Super Founders is not a book that will teach you how to create a billion dollar company, but rather a book that gives statistics on how past billion dollar companies have been founded.

Throughout Super Founders, there are some interesting tidbits on billion dollar companies. I think that the author, Ali Tamaseb, does a good job of differentiating causation from correlation. Super Founders is based on a random sampling of startups that made it to unicorn status (billion dollar valuation) from a general pool of startups. Tamaseb then tries to find potential factors that helped propel the unicorn startups (everything is in hindsight, but it is the only way Tamaseb could use statistics to argue his points).

I thought Super Founders was interesting because it discussed points like whether companies that bootstrap are less likely to become unicorns than VC backed companies, whether younger founders are more likely to create unicorns than older founders, one-person startups vs. team led startups, tech-based founding team vs. non-technical founding team, etc. A lot of the data suggested that there is no one way to create a unicorn (as to be expected), but that certain factors may carry more weight than others.

If you are interested in potentially starting your own company/startup in the future, I think Super Founders is worth reading. At the very least, it will give you a starting point for thinking about some key decisions you will have to make as a founder.

Super Founders Recommendation Rating: 4

1: Something worth checking out if you have time

2: Something that is a hit for some people, but not a must for everyone

3: Something worth prioritizing if interested

4: Something worth making time to check out

5: An absolute home run, worth going out of your way for