Super Founders

Mark Zuckerberg, who was a Harvard student when he started Facebook in his college dorm, is a famous outlier among founders of $1 billion companies. On average, says venture capitalist Ali Tamaseb’s data-based report, those who launched billion-dollar firms from 2005 to 2018 had 11 years of experience as executives or entrepreneurs. However, fewer than half had prior experience in the industries where their giant companies compete, and they’re as likely to have a background in business management as in technology. Tamaseb reports that most of these billion-dollar start-ups began in Silicon Valley, and they upended existing markets rather than inventing new ones.