“Second time founders are more likely than first time founders to start a billion-dollar companies… What I found among the successful founders was a never-ending itch for building, selling or creating something.”
Ali Tamaseb is a partner at Data Collective (DCVC), a VC firm in Silicon Valley with over $2B under management and investments in over ten separate billion-dollar startups. Tamaseb received a B.Eng. in Biomedical Engineering from Imperial College London and graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was an honoree of the British Alumni Award, and Imperial College President’s Medal for Outstanding Achievement. His recently published book is Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups.
There are many popular narratives about what makes a great entrepreneur that do not actually match most successful founders. Ali Tamaseb spent four years researching around 300 different billion-dollar companies started in the last 15 years. Tamaseb explains some of the key findings related to successful founders. For example, many were not experienced in the field in which they started their company. Tamaseb hopes his extensive data-driven research will help future investors and founders better understand what makes a successful startup.
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SPEAKER
Ali Tamaseb
Partner
DCVC
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darcie: (00:07)
Hello everyone. And welcome back to salt talks. My name is John Darcie. I'm the managing director of salt, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance technology and public policy. Salt talks are a digital interview series that we started in 2020 with leading investors, creators and thinkers. And our goal on these salt talks the same as our bowl at our salt conferences, which we're excited to resume with salt New York in September of 2021. And our goal is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And we're very excited today to welcome Ali Tomasa to salt talks. Ali is a partner at data collective, also known as DCVC, which is a highly reputable venture capital firm in Silicon valley with over $2 billion us in assets, under management, he holds several leadership and board positions at companies both globally and across the United States.
John Darcie: (01:09)
He holds a degree in biomedical engineering from Imperial college of London and studied general management at Stanford graduate school of business. Uh, Tomasa was an honoree of the British alumni award centenary enterprise award and the Imperial college metal for outstanding achievement. His work has been featured in BBC, the guardian Forbes, the Telegraph among many other news outlets. And he's given talks at major events and conferences. Hopefully salt is in his future as well. Uh, he lives today in San Francisco, California, despite being very much a citizen of the world. And I know DCVC, uh, does business around the world as well. And I don't want to get started without mentioning that he's also the author of a new book it's called super founders. What data reveals about billion dollar startups. I'm fascinated to learn more about what the data reveals so we can hopefully find that next unicorn hosting today's talk is Sarah Koons, who is the founder of Cleo capital and a frequent guest host here on salt talks. We've loved getting Sarah and her perspective involved in these conversations. And with that, I'll turn it over to Sarah for the interview.
Sarah Kunst: (02:14)
Hi, so excited to be here and so excited to hear about what makes a super founder a super founder. Um, so before we dive into that, Ali, thank you so much for joining us. And we'd love to just hear a little bit more about, you know, your story and, and your motivation to write this. Why are you giving, giving away the guide so that everybody else can find deals as good as you are?
Ali Tamaseb: (02:39)
Thank you, Sarah. I'm glad to be here with you and John. I think the motivation behind this book, it started four years ago and you know, there's a lot of popular narratives about what makes for great. And I think a bunch of that comes from media, the social network movie, or watch that we know about the stories of Steve jobs and Steve Wozniak, two co-founders, one technical, one business, visionary, you know, savvy. There's a lot of these famous stories. There's not actually a lot. There's a few of these famous stories that shaped our mindset about what the rest looks like. But today there's 300 something billion dollar companies that are started in the past 15 years. And they don't necessarily all look like the same or look like these couple pocket or narratives that we do. And it's my job as an investor to sort through thousands of companies every year to take it back one or two shots and sit on the, sit on a couple of boards and, you know, help these companies get to bidding dollar exits and, you know, nobody had done the work of going to the ground troops of seeing, was there something different about these companies that become billion dollar companies and outcomes or not?
Ali Tamaseb: (03:49)
So I decided to collect the data and, you know, it's, it's a very hard thing. It's, there is know some data about the financing history of startups out there on platforms like PitchBook and Crunchbase, but there's no data on the competitive landscape. And these companies started on the defensibility factors on the carrier path, on the founders, on the fundraising history, on the origin of the idea on the pivots. There's a lot of factors. So I sit on 65 different factors and I collected this on every unicorn that's been founded in the past 15 years, every industry tech, biotech, health, energy index, as well as a collected the same data on every non unicorn, every company that had raised a minimum of $3 million in venture capital, but did not become a successful outcome. So I had some stuff to compare between the two groups and those findings are shocking. I decided to write a book and I decided to interview a lot of these founders. I interviewed founder of zoom, Instacart, nest, and investors like Alfred Lin of Sequoia and Peter Hill.
Sarah Kunst: (04:53)
That's awesome. And what did you find? What, what brand of hoodie makes founders most likely to be successful?
Ali Tamaseb: (05:00)
Um, you know, the shocking thing was the data showed a lot of factors that normally we've thought to be correlated with success are not correlated with success. And that's sort of the shocking and counter-intuitive part is obviously the data showed. There's a bunch of things that do matter. So there's some truisms and there's a lot of stereotypes and we will talk about both of them in this session. Maybe let's start with some of these stereotypes. The one that I like is about, you know, successful founders need to have solved their own problem. They need to be, you know, their own customer. They need to have a personal mission or a personal problem. And I think you see that again, it's, it's, it's a little bit of that narrative bias. The bias comes from, you know, these stories make for a good story and they make themselves into media and you see and read articles about them.
Ali Tamaseb: (05:51)
But when you actually collect the data, you see that a lot of these, you know, very successful founders, very opportunity event, they found a good trend. They are excited about starting a company, the events we talked to different types of customers, they jumped from industry to industry until they found the right idea. And we often don't hear about that one or two years of a journey that these entrepreneurs went on to find the right idea. We only hear the last part and somehow connect that to, we know this founder had this problem when they were in and there were a child or something happened to them and try to connect the dots like that. But oftentimes that doesn't exist. A similar thing to that is about, uh, having domain expertise in the same industry. I think a lot of ways we assess company startup founders is, you know, are you, you're building an insurance company?
Ali Tamaseb: (06:40)
How much do you know about insurance? Or how many years have you worked in insurance? It turns out that doesn't matter. Only 30% of consumer tech founders of unicorns had to work in the same industry. Only 40% of enterprise SAS. You know, unicorns has worked in the same industry, the rest, they had this, a skill of learning more than anybody else about the specific problem. They had the resources and connections and the soft skills to go on and know about that specific venture into the market. More than anybody else, even if they were not from the same industry, there's a lot more there's there's there's about things about age. You know, there are people who were looking for the 19 year old, 20 year old college dropout to people who are looking forward to gray hair, you know, to treat decades of work experience. It seems like again, age was not correlated with success.
Ali Tamaseb: (07:30)
You can be 19 years old, you can be 68. I think that was the oldest that I had in my dataset to start a company. And when you even compared it to distributions and median age was 34 among tech unicorns, and 42 among healthcare and biotech, which seems a little bit older than you. When I survey people were asked them, what do you think the average founder of a billion dollar company when they started that company look like, you know, there, there was a ton, uh, we can go on about competition. For example, a lot of people try to say, we don't have competition. You're the only people, 85% of unicorns, hatch competition. When they started, they won in most of these cases, they were competing with big sleepy, incumbent giants. Uh, you know, they're competing with the Oracles and the visas and JP Morgan's of the world, you know, rather than other startups. So, you know, th there's a lot we can go on. If you have specific thoughts about any of these topics you wanted to ask, go on, or, you know, each of them are in the different chapters of the book. I go into details and provide examples of stories of the companies. Yeah,
Sarah Kunst: (08:36)
No, this, this is there's, there's so many, I have so many questions. Um, so, you know, one, one really, uh, one really interesting data point I thought, um, was, was the schools they attended. So, so dig into that a little bit more. I think there's this, this thought that, you know, it's kind of Stanford, Harvard or bust, um, and, and it feels like you found something pretty different.
Ali Tamaseb: (08:58)
Yeah. So the data showed that school does matter. So that's one of the factors that is correlated at success and, you know, the typical Stanford, Harvard, and MIT's, they do contribute a lot of, you know, founding founding CEOs of these billion dollar companies. However, then you look at the full distribution, you see that there were as many founders of unicorns that hadn't attended schools, not even in the top 100 as the same, the same number of them had attended to top 10 schools. So it looks like a bar book, 36%, top 10 university founders, 37%, you know, top, not even in the top 100 and the rest in the middle. So again, it is correlated, but there's a lot of hope there's, you know, 58% or 68% of founders of these billion-dollar companies did not go to a top 10 schools. Yeah.
Sarah Kunst: (09:53)
That's really interesting. So, you know, what, what, is there a Moneyball strategy here, right. Do, do, do people just pick up the book and then, you know, make a really crazy spreadsheet and say, you know, if you're a founder who's doing XYZ, you know, take our money because you're, you're statistically more likely to, to make me really rich. Um, how, how do you think about, I guess one that, that for the gamblers in the crowd and then to, you know, how do you think about that just impacting your own investing?
Ali Tamaseb: (10:20)
For sure. So I think it's the reverse. We can become better investors by putting away our preconceptions and misjudgments about a specific founder or a company it's amazing to go. Like there's a bunch of things that book showed. It matters, large industry. It does matter defensibility. It does matter. Previous work experience doesn't matter. Being a former entrepreneur, doesn't matter if you have previously sold the company for small amount, that does matter. There's a bunch of things that the book and the study found out to be, uh, contributors to success. And I will talk specifically about one of them, uh, which is the previous, you know, entrepreneurial, uh, things that you've done. But I think my goal with the book is to push the industry in your head, let give, give a notch to, you know, the other investors that, you know, if the put some or preconception notions about and where the ideas come from, chip on the shoulders, somebody solving their own personal problems. You know, what degree they have, we can become better investors by not saying no to the companies that go on and to company dollar companies it's as, as important to say yes to the companies that are successful, as not saying no to companies, you see, you have access to invest by rejects for the wrong reasons. And I talk about all these wrong reasons to reject the company for
Sarah Kunst: (11:41)
What are some of the wrong reasons to reject a company,
Ali Tamaseb: (11:46)
You know, family members, uh, starting as a company. I see a lot of investors reject founders based on that, you know, there's a of successful companies that two brothers, two brothers, modern Sohn, fiances, married couples that happens and they're successful. Um, you know, not investing in a company because they have competition because what if Google does, you know, MasterCard does this. And in a lot of these cases, these startups end up becoming successful, or, you know, not having domain expertise in a specific industry. Now, what do you know about this industry? There's a lot of these reasons which might be wrong. What is important is the character of that founder, you know, being able to sell the vision and attract super amazing people in the early days, one of the best examples of this Katrina lake of stitch fix, you know, first one year, she attracting amazing talent out of Netflix, out of Walmart to join her as in the executive team, these are some of the factors that are contributors to the success of these companies.
Sarah Kunst: (12:49)
Yeah. And, and, you know, talk a little bit more about, you know, you talk about how early value creation matters. And obviously it's a little bit more nuanced than, Hey, if you sold your first company for a billion, you'll probably sell your second for 2 billion. So, you know, what do you mean by that early value creation? Um, especially when it, it isn't, uh, you know, just you're already incredibly rich.
Ali Tamaseb: (13:10)
Exactly. So I think, you know, when then investors think about investing in serial entrepreneurs or serial successful entrepreneurs, it's exactly what you say. You know, you sold the company for $500 million. Your next one would be [inaudible], that's normally what comes to mind. What I found is, I mean, that's obviously true, but it expands the beyond that, uh, founders, founders, you know, second time founders are more likely than first time to start billion dollar companies. Second time founders whose previous company was a small success. Maybe it was an equal hire or maybe a technology acquisition. Dave are more likely to start a billion dollar company next, you know, even people who didn't start venture backed companies, you know, started a side hustle and made a million dollars. They started a project and, you know, somebody wanted to buy that for, you know, $500,000 or $2 million. They were more likely to start bidding dollar companies.
Ali Tamaseb: (14:07)
What I found among these, you know, successful calendars was a never ending H for building something, for selling something, for creating, you know, even, even not for money. Uh, I can give a lot of examples here that founder CloudFlare had started a non-profits, you know, STAM email collection tool before starting Kopser founder of call the, you know, $2 billion meditation app, which is, you know, very popular had started this vet page, the million dollar homepage, which was, you know, a million pixels who would sell each pixel for $1 know a lot of people paid attention to it. He made a million dollars. That was it. It wasn't a bench of venture backed, you know, success. It wasn't exit. We've made a million dollars founders of Stripe, you know, the $80 billion company they were in first time entrepreneurs, even though they became billionaires by the age of 20 something, before that, they had started a company, an auction management tool for eBay sellers called Octa Matic that was acquired for four and a half million dollars.
Ali Tamaseb: (15:06)
Before that founder of Spotify, he sold a company for, I think, $1 million before, out of Coinbase. He started, you know, comfortable university tutor, even the big, big, big people that we think are first time founders, bill gates, Microsoft wasn't the first company [inaudible] was the first company Zuckerberg. Facebook was the first company, but it wasn't his first project. He had started a bunch of projects in different apps before. One of them would add on the Angelo founder of Cora, which was a music player, a synopsis music player. So you see the never ending passion in H going out, creating, selling, and, you know, moving on to the next thing among these founders.
Sarah Kunst: (15:46)
Well, in middle school or in high school, I would get in trouble because I would knit during class and then I would sell them. And so I would knit during class so people could see it and then get excited and they would pay me more. So I guess that means I'll be a billionaire, I assume is what I'm hearing. Exactly. Exactly. Don't worry. I'll send you the docs after. Um, so I mean that, that these are, these are just such interesting insights. Um, what's, what's the thing out of all of this looks like the one data point that surprised you the most.
Speaker 4: (16:17)
Um, if I were to say, well, one,
Ali Tamaseb: (16:24)
I would say competition, um, 70% of these unicorns, we're not creating a new category and they were competing for share in an existing market, but better execution. I think a lot of us are thinking about new. You need to be creating a whole new category from zero. You need to be Coinbase, but turns out a lot of these billion dollar companies, the majority of these billion dollar companies are doing better execution in a massive market. They take market share and they become big. And actually on average, they had created larger companies than new category creation companies, which seems a little bit counter intuitive to me, but it's not same thing on being a first mover, only 30% or a first mover, 70% retinol. And they had, they were just recycling old ideas that became successful. It's at a different point. And when they became successful, it was because of an inflection point in terms of regulation or a new technology.
Sarah Kunst: (17:25)
No, that that's super interesting. Um, that there's yes, I I'm thinking through, you know,
John Darcie: (17:30)
And my followup question about competence. Well, what is it then, John, what's your follow-up for that? You know, the competition fees. Do you think competition makes people better? I think about Stripe as an example, and they're in sort of a commoditized space where you have add gin, you have PayPal, you have a square, you have authorized.net. There's all kinds of different ways that you can take payments, but Stripe has just continued to aggressively innovate around all the data and information that they gather, because they're the main point of sale. That's just one example. But do you think competition breeds, excellence type of situation? Or what do you think the drivers of success in a more competitive environment, as opposed to that moat concept that somebody like Warren buffet talks about when he invests?
Ali Tamaseb: (18:16)
For sure. I think competition from good big companies is a sign that that market is large and you want nothing better than a massive market that the customer is educated. Somebody has paid the price, educate the market to take the market time and risk. And at this point it's a massive market. Customer is educated and you can just go execute better and sell. And obviously, you know, it does drive innovation and, you know, a lot of excellent seeing the way these companies operate. But I think the biggest thing is it's a sign that the market exists and it's large.
John Darcie: (18:49)
They almost like if you start a company and there's nobody trying to do anything, resembling what you're doing, maybe you're solving for a problem that doesn't exist. Exactly. That's an interesting way to think about it.
Speaker 4: (19:02)
Yeah, yeah. That is, that
Sarah Kunst: (19:04)
Is a super interesting way to think about it. How, how much do you feel like, so I guess how long did collecting all this data and writing the book take you and, and you know, what changes have you seen in your own investing since sort of, you know, before you started doing this or before you kind of, you know, started digging in and then now after you see these findings,
Ali Tamaseb: (19:24)
Yeah. It's a little bit over four years. So the data collection piece took three, three and a half years. And the writing, the book piece took me one year and interviews and stuff. So, you know, the hardest part was data collection. It's 30,000 data points. You can outsource it, you can't automate it. It requires a lot of judgment meeting, cold emailing surveys, a lot of different things to collect this data. So that was the longest and hardest part. Um, and then the interviews were the most fun part because I got, you know, talked to all these amazing founders and investors. Um, and again, the little bit hard part at the end was editing and finishing and making it into a book the way this, this has changed my thinking, I think number one is to not let my judgments come into debate of backing a great entrepreneur.
Ali Tamaseb: (20:16)
You know, you don't need everything to check out for a company. You don't need everything to be good about a company. That's not a recipe for investing in the best company. You need to, one thing to be exceptionally good and that the other pieces may fall into pieces or the theater pieces will fall in and, you know, the company would work out. So that's one, the second is, you know, again, instead of looking for what company you worked at or what university you come from, these kinds of stuff, look for this characteristic it. And what have you sold before? What have you built before? What type of money did you make before coming and starting this company? And I think you can get a lot of information about the characteristics of these founders rather than proxy metrics like university or your work and these kind of stuff.
Sarah Kunst: (21:05)
I love that characteristics, not proxy metrics. I like it. Um, how, how do you think, you know, there, there's obviously in our industry, sometimes a lot of bias in terms of who gets funded and who doesn't, how does this data help sort of disrupt that because you know, that the pattern matching that everybody talks about in our industry, you know, I think your book is a great point that it's not the pattern matching it's bad. It's just that most people are probably matching, you know, the wrong patterns. And so how do you think this helps, you know, kind of expand the aperture? Does it help expand the aperture of who should be looking at getting funding?
Ali Tamaseb: (21:38)
For sure. Yeah. I guess the point is instead of letting 10 or five famous stories run that, you know, pattern matching, let's 200 companies run that pattern matching. So by showcasing, I think I have hundreds of stories from a hundred different companies in the book, you know, all different examples or different attributes. So I hope, you know, this helps show a lot more examples of some of these companies that went on and became successful. And sometimes against the odds, a lot of my interviews is, you know, companies that succeeded, even though they didn't agree with what the data was saying about them. So I wanted to give the full picture about, you know, there's patterns. There's, anti-pattern, there's a lot of different things that may work, uh, even at the, at the odds that data. Um, I think the main way it's in reduced bias is, you know, telling investors and entrepreneurs that a lot of things you may have cared about before you don't necessarily need to care about how many co-founders you have, what university you went to, you know, a lot of these things, or if your family members, or if you have competition with, you know, and it depends on what type of competition.
Ali Tamaseb: (22:43)
But if you go and look into a lot of these, you know, patterns and factors, you realize you can put aside some of your judgment or wrong bias against, and look for characteristics, look for a big market, look for, uh, you know, some sort of defensibility or accumulating advantages that would make this company a massive success.
John Darcie: (23:02)
I got a question, Ali it's about geographics. I want to dig more into that question. So if you're on Twitter, you have to see Keith Rabois every day and all of his minions pumping up Miami as the next big tech hubs, everybody's got to move to Miami. You know, obviously Silicon Valley's had a high concentration of startup founders of talent of VCs. Uh, but that's sort of decentralizing, COVID acting as an accelerant for that. As you looked at data around, you know, geographic location and what types of areas incubated the most successful startups, what did that data show, does it show that it's more decentralized than we think it is, or did it show that Silicon valley dominated and also as you look globally, is there any know explosion in entrepreneurship around the world? I think you and I both have spent some time in the middle east, uh, in the UAE in particular, uh, where there's, there's a pretty thriving, uh, startup ecosystem that's developing there, but what are your thoughts on the geographic piece?
Ali Tamaseb: (23:58)
Yeah. So when you look at the data and you have to pay attention, this is historic data. So I'm not sure given everything that happened, but COVID distributed work, remote work, everything was accelerated towards this. So I'm not sure how predictive that data would be, but I'll tell you the historical observation historically, or in the past 15 years, exactly. Half of billion dollar companies were created in Silicon valley. The other half were created in different tech hops, Southern California and New York, Boston, uh, and you know, a lot of different regions that you can think about in the book. I have a number of interesting interviews. One of them is Rachel calls and found rogue Guild education. What's very interesting about her story. And this is, you know, a multi-billion dollar company in the upskilling and attack the space that she was in Silicon valley. The company started here raised money here.
Ali Tamaseb: (24:48)
She was a Stanford MBA grad, and then intentionally moved the company to Denver, which is not a traditional tech hub and the company thrive there. And she's very happy with the decision, you know, looking back five years, six years after. So I think a lot of this move towards, you know, let's go out of Silicon valley, let's go where it makes sense for the company. I talk about root insurance, which is, um, you know, not in a Silicon valley tech hub, but it's there, there's a concentration of people from the insurance and InsureTech industry. Um, so I think you need to look for, what's better for your startups, but you know, when you look at the data, the companies in Silicon valley, they were more likely to succeed. So there seems to be some, something about concentration that helps or historically have helped. Now, maybe that thing can distribute to other tech hubs that get enough concentration of talents. It could be Miami, it could be Boston, it could be New York or anywhere else or even internationally, but it seems like at least historically there was something to that concentration of talent and capital, maybe in the future that, that doesn't remain. I don't know the answer to that
John Darcie: (25:52)
Question. I'll look forward to super founders to the CQL super founders where you study sort of the post COVID era, uh, Steve case, who's a friend of salts who's been on salt talks who has been at our conferences. Now he has a fund that's invest in the idea that at least in the United States, you're going to see a greater distribution of talent and startups in the rest of the country, outside of Silicon valley and also in New York or the places that he looks for for startups outside of those places. And you see companies like Palentier move to Denver, for example. Uh, so you are seeing, you know, uh, people relocate and look for higher quality of life with the ability, uh, and in the explosion of remote work. So again, looking forward to super founders, 2.0, get started four years in the making right. Only four
Ali Tamaseb: (26:37)
More years ago. Yeah. Hopefully I'll, I'll spend another four years and in 10 years,
John Darcie: (26:43)
The last four years I created, uh, for children. So, uh, I need to spend more time, you know, maybe working, um,
Sarah Kunst: (26:51)
Actually, yeah. Do you have any data about, about, uh, family? How, how many, how many founders are parents? Oh, I don't want to hear
John Darcie: (26:58)
It. You can to tell me that my career is done now because I got too many kids.
Ali Tamaseb: (27:02)
I don't know the answers to that. And probably not because, you know, when did median age is 34, you know, you can make some assumptions about the family situations of these founders.
Sarah Kunst: (27:13)
Yeah. That, that, that is very true. That is very true. Um, well, sorry, John, you're doomed. Uh, but you know, maybe one of your kids will have a great chance. Actually. That's another interesting question, you know, is, are there correlations like that? I know that, you know, it seems like a lot of times founders feel like, Hey, you know, I started my company because I saw, you know, I'm from an entrepreneurial family and it doesn't usually, it's not that they were tech startup family, but you know, maybe their, their parents owned a restaurant or something like that, you know, or you hear a lot about, you know, uh, the, the disproportionate number of immigrants who start companies, are those things that, that I think even founders believe about themselves, are those showing in the data or, or is it, is that less important or just not, not stuff that ended up in this dataset.
Ali Tamaseb: (28:01)
It did not, you know, the hard thing about doing a study like this is you need to pick metrics that you can collect that data on all these, you know, a couple of hundred companies and the non unicorns. And it's impossible to do things outside of, you know, traditional things like, you know, what you can get from LinkedIn and interviews and these kinds of stuff, uh, maybe you can get about 20 of them, but not all a hundred. So I didn't from the stories, I guess it, it does, you know, hearing a lot of these entrepreneurs seems like a lot of them come from families who were academics. You know, a lot of them had, you know, moms or dads who were professors or who were entrepreneurs who had started non-tech companies and they had seen that path. Um, but I guess what's more important than that is they themselves had a history of starting stuff and building companies and projects from, from a young gage and, you know, finding the, and eventually they got to starting that massive billion dollar outcome.
John Darcie: (28:57)
Yeah. So one of your key findings that you talked about Ali is the idea that, that most unicorn founders had no industry experience. So I work in the financial industry. Uh, SkyBridge is basically a hedge fund to fund to funds. We also, uh, do some direct investing as well. I guess you could consider us a legacy financial institution. We work with a lot of traditional banks, but you're seeing an explosion in FinTech, you know, that this was happening even before COVID COVID has been an accelerant for FinTech. So when companies are going into a new space, you think basically based on your data, that the idea that you're coming in with a fresh perspective, let's say the financial industry, as an example, most FinTech startups are created by people that didn't grow up as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a wealth manager at Morgan Stanley.
Ali Tamaseb: (29:44)
Yeah. And again, when you, when you look at the distribution, it doesn't say you are less or more likely if you don't like, it's not a good thing. If you don't have domain expertise, it's also not a good thing. If you don't have domain expertise, you know, 30% of consumer tech founders did have domain expertise and only 40% of SAS enterprise did have industry domain expertise, but it goes back to the characteristic thing. When you look at a lot of these founders, they had the resources, maybe they had some track record, maybe they had, you know, had this small exit before it built that reputation to go and network with people in this industry and go on a fast learning curve of, you know, in one or two years, learn more than anybody else about that specific part of this specific industry that they wanted to go into straw. They would know about that more than anybody else. There was no more people in that more than anybody else. And it's those kinds of soft skills about having the resources and the network and getting the talent and capital and selling division. That's more important than, you know, having 10 years of experience as a Bell's manager to be able to come in and build a Bell's management software company. For example,
Sarah Kunst: (30:50)
That's really interesting. I feel like what you're telling us is there's not just a cheat code where we can go identify a billionaire as soon to be billion dollar startups, but, you know, and it's so important. I think to, to question some of the things we take for granted, um, you know, what, what, how, how long back did this data go, meaning, you know, is this data a big reflection of like the last 10 years or the last 20 years and in how
Ali Tamaseb: (31:14)
Much? So 2005, yeah. 2005 to start was the start of this data set.
Sarah Kunst: (31:19)
Yeah. You know, how, how much do you think, what do you think would change? Obviously, the Internet's changed so dramatically since pre pre 2005, but you know, if you, do you think if you ran this again, 15 years from now, you would see a lot of similar data sets or are there, you know, massive in your mind fundamental kind of macro shifts that, that might, you know, show that that totally different profiles of
Speaker 4: (31:42)
Founders are successful?
Ali Tamaseb: (31:44)
I think some things will change. Certainly the names and numbers would change, you know, the companies. So for example, if you look at the early cohort of the 2005 to 2008, nine companies, those founders are more likely to have worked at Yahoo or at Oracle. When you look at the past five years, those founders more likely to have worked at square or Facebook or Stripe. Um, so that's the kind of, you know, a lot of these numbers change or, you know, what was a seed round back in 2005 is, you know, a pre pre seed round now, uh, in 2021. So a lot of these numbers change, but even when I look at different industries or geographies or different times, a lot of these trends and a lot of these characteristics all are still the same. You know, it's the same people who had a blog for building back in 2005 and the are the same people in 2020 that had a bunk foot building and have created stuff that ended up becoming billion dollar founders. Same thing about competition, same thing about a lot of different things. Obviously industries change, new categories emerge new macro shifts like geography and remote work can, you know, alter data. But I think generally a lot of these may hold. Okay. Yeah,
Sarah Kunst: (32:53)
Yeah, no, I, I, you know, instinctively, I kind of, I'm inclined to agree. Um, but, but we'll see, cause we have all the data now. Um, how do you hope people will use this book? I mean, should, should founders be reading this to try to reverse engineer success, should investors be reading it to do the same thing? You know, how, how this feels like it's going to become a must read in a, in a big teaching tool. So also of course tell us where, where we can find it and where we can buy it. But, you know, we'd love to just kind of know how you envision this being used out in the world.
Ali Tamaseb: (33:26)
Yeah. I hope, you know, founders, investors and people around the industry and lawyers, mentors, advisors, accelerators, incubators, investment bankers. I think that's, that's the audience for this book. And anybody, you know, honestly is interested in starting companies and entrepreneurship and the way I think, you know, there's a lot of practical advice for founders in the book based on the data that, you know, this is something doesn't, that doesn't matter, maybe, you know, number of co-founders doesn't matter. So if it means that you have four amazing people to start a company started doing stick to the narrative that you need to go founders. So a lot of these things I talk about in the book that know something doesn't matter, don't, don't sweat it. Um, and you know, same thing for investors, you know, reducing bias. And there's a lot of inspiration in these stories and interviews that, you know, I think as a founder, uh, it would be very interesting to read and understand the path that, you know, these couple of hundred other companies took and these founders took to become a massively successful founder.
Sarah Kunst: (34:27)
Awesome. Yeah. That's super helpful. John, do you have any last questions?
John Darcie: (34:30)
Well, my last question is when does the book come out working? We buy it, uh, tell us all that about super funds.
Ali Tamaseb: (34:38)
Yeah. So the books come out May 18th, uh, just at the shelves it's available on Amazon audible, Kindle, local bookstores. Um, you can read it in different versions and us and outside of us as well. A lot of different countries
John Darcie: (34:53)
Dictate the audible version. I
Ali Tamaseb: (34:55)
Did not know there is somebody much who has a much better voice and accent than we needed. That's doing the honors. All right. Well,
Sarah Kunst: (35:03)
You would have been great at it, but everybody needs to go get this book and, and you know, maybe, maybe we can get you a, to, to New York in September for the salt conference and everybody can, can hit you up for advice on how to, uh, to invest in the next unicorn IRL.
Ali Tamaseb: (35:20)
For sure. I'll be glad to.
John Darcie: (35:22)
Okay. All right. Again, the book is called super founders. What data reveals about billion dollar startups, really looking forward to reading it. Ali, thank you so much for joining us on the show and thank you everybody for tuning into today's salt. Talk with Ali Thomas hub of just a reminder. If you missed any part of this talk or any of our previous salt talks, you can access them on our website. It's salt.org backslash talks or on our YouTube channel, which is called salt tube. Uh, just a reminder. We're also on social media. LinkedIn is where we're most active at salt conference, but we're also on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook as well. One data point that Ali didn't point out is that people who watch salt talks are actually, uh, 74% more likely to become unicorns, uh, that is unaudited on verified, but, uh, it it's a snippet that that's in part of his book. I'm not going to tell you what page it's on, but, uh, thank you everybody for tuning in and please spread the word about these salt talks, but on behalf of Sarah and the entire salt team, this is John Darcie signing off from salt talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.