Alex Tew isn’t your stereotypical Ivy League college dropout or software engineer at Google who founded a billion-dollar startup. Tew was a student at Nottingham University when he started his first project. His itch for building something and making some money had led him to create “The Million Dollar Homepage” in 2005. The website consisted of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid. The pixels were sold for $1 per pixel and the purchasers of these pixel blocks were advertisers. This is before “Display Ads” were a big thing. In four months’ time, word of the…

This is now the fifth year I’m writing this post, hopefully, it has not become boring and you find a couple of books from this list that are new and you get to read over the holidays or next year. You can also find the lists for the last three years here: 2019, 2018, 2017.

Many of you know that I Mostly Listen to Books on Audible while I commute. So this year, given I was mostly working from home, I commuted a lot less, and as a result, I ended up reading about 5 fewer books than I did…

As I have done in the past couple of years (2018 list, 2017 list), I’m sharing the list of books I finished this year.

As always, I have been using Audible and listening to books on 2.5x speed (I’ve slowly trained myself over the past 4 years and now perfectly comfortable in 2-2.5x speed range). I recommend you to train your brain to listen faster too. It helps you stay focused on the book and not to be distracted with your own thoughts and is an interesting mental exercise.

This year I started listening to 23 books, but I stopped…

It’s that time of the year again and as we are heading to start a new year, here is a recap of the books I listened to in the past year. I have been doing this exercise for the past three years (Here’s the list of the books I listened to in 2017) and find it beneficial to internally reflect on what I’ve learned and what types of books made me keep on reading to finish, as well as to give suggestions to friends and connections.

As always, I have been using Audible and listening to books on 2.5x speed…

Update: I wrote a book. “Super Founders”

I spent another two years after the publication of this article gathering the same data on non-unicorn startups, so I could accurately compare what differentiates billion-dollar startups from those that failed to become one. This is the first such study that has been done with over 30,000 data points. I also interviewed founders of 15 billion dollar startups including Zoom, Nest, GitHub, Cloudflare, PayPal, Affirm, Brex, Kite Pharma, Instacart, as well as VCs like Peter Thiel, Elad Gil, and Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital), Keith Rabois (Founders Fund). You can pre-order the book now!

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Today, Dropbox had its long-anticipated initial public offering and was offered on NASDAQ under the ticker DBX. The total value at the offering was around $9Bn. This exit will return billions of dollars to venture capital investors including over $2Bn to Sequoia, over $450m to Accel Partners, and astronomical returns for early stage Iranian investors like Pejman Nozad.

Arash Ferdowsi, Dropbox’s co-founder and CTO, is an Iranian-American who was a student at MIT with Drew Houston, the other founder and CEO of Dropbox. …

Well, it is all of them, plus a lot of chance. Many things can go right or wrong for a startup that cannot be controlled, such as market decline, regulation change, trend shifts, team problems, partnerships conflicts, unforeseen costs, etc. While these factors are out of control, the best an investor can do to select the best startups to invest in, is to determine the statistical expected return on the investment and try to maximize for the statistical expected return on investment.

In my previous article, I provided a Template for executive summary for startups or investment memo for VCs. In this article, I will introduce a model to calculate the statistical expected return.

The model is based on this basic rule:

A 1% chance of becoming a $10Bn exit, is better…

Update: I wrote a book. “Super Founders”

I spent another two years after the publication of this article gathering the same data on non-unicorn startups, so I could accurately compare what differentiates billion-dollar startups from those that failed to become one. This is the first such study that has been done with over 30,000 data points. I also interviewed founders of 15 billion dollar startups including Zoom, Nest, GitHub, Cloudflare, PayPal, Affirm, Brex, Kite Pharma, Instacart, as well as VCs like Peter Thiel, Elad Gil, and Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital), Keith Rabois (Founders Fund). You can pre-order the book now!

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