Steve Jobs, Jerry Yang, and many other founders were fired from their companies. What percentage of founders remained as CEO and were they more successful? — If you’ve been following my recent posts, you may know that I spent the last four years conducting one of the largest data-driven studies into startups, trying to understand what was different between the startups that became billion-dollar successes versus those that did not. I published the results in a…

I spent four years conducting one of the largest data-driven studies on startups, and here’s what it reveals about the difference between billion-dollar startups and startups that raised VC funding but failed to become one. — Some of you may remember a medium article I published two years ago which included dozens of colorful charts that showed data-driven facts about unicorns. That article went viral with hundreds of thousands of readers. One key feedback I received was that I needed to compare the results from the…

Founders with a small exit in their first company were much more likely to build a unicorn in their next, a new study of startups shows — 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”…

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…

This title is boring, but these books are not! — 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…

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…

I Spent 300 Hours Gathering Data On Billion-Dollar Startups and Here’s 100 Charts You Shouldn’t Miss — 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…

$600Bn+ is the total market cap of public companies with Iranian-Americans on the Board of Directors (Source: IA-CP) — 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…

Is it the experience of a team, the severity of the problem, the quality of the product, the correct timing, or the large market that makes a unicorn? — 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…