https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/18/super_founders/

There’s a lot of how-to guidance out there when it comes to starting a company, and much of it has reinforced certain beliefs, including that solo founders don’t get very far on their own, that the most successful founders attend a small circle of top schools, and that the best companies are created by people who launched them to solve a personal problem into which they had a particular insight.

Ali Tamaseb, who studied biomedical engineering at Imperial College London, attended business school at Stanford, and founded a wearable tech startup before joining the venture firm DCVC as an investor in 2018, says that lot of that guidance is, well, misguided. Tamaseb says he knows this because over the past four years, to improve his own decision-making, he amassed more than 30,000 data points about so-called “super founders,” from their age when their breakout company was founded to how many competitors they faced from the outset; in doing so, he says, he wound up discovering that much of what is espoused in startup circles is off the mark.