Super Founders  uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false!
 
Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a  
You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of  Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase , and  Square , venture capital investors like  Elad Gil ,  Peter Thiel ,  Alfred Lin  from  Sequoia Capital  and  Keith Rabois  of  Founders Fund , as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX.
 
Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies,  Super Founders  is a paradigm-shifting and  actionable  guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

The Inside Story of the Venture Capital World as Told by the Industry＇s Elite PlayersArguably today＇s hottest industry, venture capital is a dynamic engine of wealth creation that has contributed both

Entrepreneurs who dream of building the next Amazon, Facebook, or Google have the opportunity to take advantage of one of the most powerful economic engines the world has ever known: venture capital. To do that, you need to woo, impress, and persuade venture capitalists to back your endeavor. That task alone is a challenge. But finding and choosing the right investor can be harder still. Even if you manage to get backing, you want your VC to be a partner, not some dictator who will undermine your vision and take control of your life's work.
Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. By his early thirties, he had helped build two successful start-ups-one went public, the other was acquired. Now he uses his experience and unique perspective on "the other side" as a venture capitalist helping entrepreneurs bring their dreams to fruition.
In the book, Bussgang offers high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice gathered from his own experience as well as from interviews with dozens of the most successful players on both sides of the game, including Twitter's Jack Dorsey and LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partnership that works for everyone.
An insider's guide to the secrets of the world venture capital, Mastering the VC Game will prove invaluable for entrepreneurs seeking capital and successful partnerships. To learn more, visit JeffBussgang.com. (edited by author)

An engaging guide to excelling in today's venture capital arena Beginning in 2005, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, managing directors at Foundry Group, wrote a long series of blog posts describing all the parts of a typical venture capital Term Sheet: a document which outlines key financial and other terms of a proposed investment. Since this time, they've seen the series used as the basis for a number of college courses, and have been thanked by thousands of people who have used the information to gain a better understanding of the venture capital field. Drawn from the past work Feld and Mendelson have written about in their blog and augmented with newer material, Venture Capital Financings puts this discipline in perspective and lays out the strategies that allow entrepreneurs to excel in their start-up companies. Page by page, this book discusses all facets of the venture capital fundraising process. Along the way, Feld and Mendelson touch on everything from how valuations are set to what externalities venture capitalists face that factor into entrepreneurs' businesses. Includes a breakdown analysis of the mechanics of a Term Sheet and the tactics needed to negotiate Details the different stages of the venture capital process, from starting a venture and seeing it through to the later stages Explores the entire venture capital ecosystem including those who invest in venture capitalist Contain standard documents that are used in these transactions Written by two highly regarded experts in the world of venture capital The venture capital arena is a complex and competitive place, but with this book as your guide, you'll discover what it takes to make your way through it.
Q&A with Co-Authors Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
Co-Author Jason Mendelson I understand that VCs have primarily four functions they perform: raising funds, screening and investing in new businesses, managing current portfolio companies and some level of investor relations and internal operations. How do you divide your work day?
One of the great things about this job is that there is no “standard day.” Every day is different and the division of time reflects that. It's really hard to say what a typical day is like. Even typical weeks are hard to describe. It all depends on a particular partner's portfolio is doing and what their role is in the firm.
Some partners have operational responsibilities internal to the firm itself, some don't. In short, you could ask 100 VCs this answer and have 100 different answers. If you forced me to put some percentages on the table, I'd say a normal yearly time allocation (assuming that fundraising is not happening) might look something like this:
Screening, Analysis and Execution: 45%
Current Company monitoring: 45%
Investor Relations / Operations / Other: 10%
With a number of great companies being born of ideas coming from a youthful group of entrepreneurs, what advice do you have for the young person seeking to build a team of "time-tested, battle-hardened" professionals?
We think young-entrepreneurs are great. In fact, we like spending time with the younger set so much that we are active mentors and investors with Techstars. And certainly with our fund, we wouldn't hesitate to fund a first-time entrepreneur with a great idea.
Co-Author Brad Feld
I think the key to being a young entrepreneur is being self aware. Know what you know and also know what you don't. If you can communicate to a prospective investor that you are smart, have a great idea AND are emotionally intelligent and realize what other skills sets you'll need to surround yourself with, then I don't think being young and / or inexperienced will hurt your chances. In fact, youthful exuberance is infectious and sometimes younger folks will think outside the box more often than older ones who are set in their ways.
Are you aware of any VCs that have funded founders that have failed at their previous ventures?
Absolutely. Me! And many other VCs. Failure is a normal part of entrepreneurship which I've written about extensively in my blog.
My favorite entrepreneurs to fund are those that have had at least one success and one failure. While it is a cliche, failure teaches the big lessons. Most importantly, entrepreneurs that have some failure under their belt have humility and perspective that I think is deeply useful in the creation of the company.
There is a perspective – promoted by some people – that the best serial entrepreneurs have never been unsuccessful. This is a myth – the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs who I know have a long string of failures in their past.
Why don't VCs invest in real estate?
We don’t invest in real estate because we don’t know what we are doing in that market. Okay, that was a little glib, but it’s true. VCs don’t / shouldn’t invest in sectors and themes that they don’t understand. Outside of some folks that I know who made some shrewd residential moves with their personal properties, I’d not want to trust my money to a VC doing a pure-play real estate deal.

Review
"Liftoff reads like something out of the golden age of Science Fiction but this isn't a novel by Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke. This is the true, astounding story of the men and women who spun those sci-fi dreams into reality. This is as important a book on space as has ever been written and it's a riveting page-turner, too! -- HOMER HICKAM, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Rocket Boys
“This might be the best space book I've ever read. Liftoff will prove to be a defining story not only for the commercial space industry, but for the Space Age writ large, and there's no one better than Eric Berger to tell it.” -- KELLIE GERARDI, author of Not Necessarily Rocket Science
“Eric Berger brings to life the passion and sacrifice of the early SpaceX team as they navigated through countless obstacles toward unlikely success. The skillfully described technical details, paired with a candid glimpse into individual personalities, makes Liftoff a must read for space enthusiasts and novices alike.” -- KAREN NYBERG, NASA Astronaut
"[Berger] depicts race-against-the-clock crises as fast-paced as a thriller, with moments reminiscent of Apollo 13 or The Martian. ... An exciting and insightful read." -- Booklist
"The elegant brilliance of the engineering that allows today’s space rockets to land themselves back on earth—or at sea—right way up, and on target to the inch, is all the doing of the teams assembled by Elon Musk—and the story of how he did it, and how for sure he will get us to Mars whether we like it or not, is told in appropriately stellar fashion by Eric Berger in a book that held me captive, in earth orbit, from prologue to epilogue, countdown to splashdown." -- SIMON WINCHESTER, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Perfectionists
“Eric Berger has followed the exploits of SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, from its very early days. In Liftoff, Eric relates the many personal accounts collected in one-on-one interviews with Musk and many of his key leaders and associates. He chronicles the frenetic pace of Falcon 1 development and the toll it took on many of the early employees. This is a book that will hold your rapt attention from start to finish.” -- CHARLES BOLDEN, Former NASA Administrator and Four-Time Astronaut