From my list on books for founders trying to be in the 10% of businesses that succeed.
Why am I passionate about this?
For the last 25 years, I have been a coach to business founders, leaders, and leadership teams. My work has taken me to every continent from my base in London. A lot of my work is done behind closed doors, but I have been instrumental in building two unicorns in the last decade. I’m a founder myself and have always been fascinated by what it takes to succeed as a founder. I have a powerful conviction that learning to lead is the heart of it. The books I love are either based on real-world research or deeply practical and based on hands-on experience. Practice trumps theory every time in my world!
Simon's book list on books for founders trying to be in the 10% of businesses that succeed
Why did Simon love this book?
I love the fact that Ali has provided evidence that ANYONE can succeed as a founder. He has done a lot of number-crunching on ‘unicorns’ (I admire his tenacity for that!) and examined what makes a successful startup founder and some surprises emerge.
Age, education, and number of cofounders were not predictors of a startup’s success, as many of us might have expected. The big thing that does matter is experience. Sixty percent of unicorn founders had previously launched startups. It seems that in pretty much every walk of life, including this one, practice is the key.
1 author picked Super Founders as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Every VC wants to find the next billion dollar company to invest in, and every startup wants to become one. Ali Tamaseb set out to find patterns in the backgrounds, methods, and trajectories of these companies, gathering and analyzing 40,000 data points about the 200+ billion dollar companies and the people who founded them. And you'll be surprised by what he discovered:
* Half of unicorn founders are over 35;
* Most founders don't have any directly relevant work experience in the industry they're disrupting;
* There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder;
* Sixty percent of billion dollar…