A West End View From Founders Plaza
Dallas, Texas
20250426_120126.2 by mikehogan2
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A West End View From Founders Plaza
Dallas, Texas
Founders Plaza
Dallas, Texas
If a founder has prior experience of being a successful founder, their next startup has an 8x higher chance of becoming a unicorn. “This was the strongest difference I observed in my data between the billion-dollar and the random group.” — author Ali Tamaseb
“Almost all the founders of billion-dollar companies are builders. Going back to high school, or even younger, many of them started side projects, student clubs, or even companies. Those projects weren’t about striking it rich so much as scratching an itch to create.”
Study period: 2005 – 2018, 200 unicorns vs a random sample of 200 non-unicorns that also raised at least $3M of VC. It’s “one of the largest data sets ever compiled on startups and what leads to their success.”
“Over 90% of billion-dollar startups were VC backed.” Co-investment with a top tier VC -> 5x the outcome.
"Some of the largest companies in my study were founded during the recession. Perhaps innovation comes from constraints.”
“Unicorns make up less than 0.1% of startups.”
“Just over half of the unicorns were headquartered in the SF Bay Area, compared to 1/3 in the random group.”
Not correlated with success: age of founders, number of founders, or domain expertise. "The mythology doesn't always match reality."
“Fewer then 50% of founding CEOs had much, if any, work experience related to their startup. In science-related startups, the story is a little different. 75% of founders in biotech had direct relevant experience, enterprise tech 40%, and in consumer only 30% had direct relevant experience.”
“The founders of billion-dollar companies were more likely to work for themselves or to have worked at a tier-one company.”
“If there is one takeaway from this book, the best preparation for starting a wildly successful company is starting a company. If you have never started a company, the best preparation is to start something, maybe a club or a side hustle.”
Unicorn founders “tend to have a compulsion to build stuff.”
Detail from the Unsung Founders Memorial acknowledging and apologizing for the slave labor that helped build the campus
The water in the creek is high enough that there was even a little waterfall where it met Lake Superior.
