About 15 months ago, I embarked on a journey to answer a personal question: what did billion-dollar startups look like when they were getting started? There are a lot of stereotypes and preconceptions out there, as well as some articles and studies done over the years, but none answered my questions as a former founder and current VC. My key, unanswered questions about these startups included:

How many competitors did they have when they started?

What were their defensibility/moats?

Did the founders have work experience in the same sector/industry? How many years of overall work experience did they have?

Did the founders work in a start-up before as an employee? Were they founders before? Was their previous attempt successful?

Did they go through an accelerator program?

How long did it take them from when they started to when they got the first check?

The public data is limited to the names of companies, founders, and valuations, etc., but I wanted to go much deeper and understand the founders and business landscape better. Consequently, I had to gather a lot of manual data by going over LinkedIn profiles, reading interviews, sending emails to the founders, and gather some from crunchbase and pitchbook.

Since then, I have spent more than 300 hours in my free time over weekends to manually gather data and quantify 65 factors on all 195 startups founded after 2005 until today in the U.S. that at one point passed the 1 billion dollar mark in valuation.

It is important to note that this study is not just limited to unicorns (originally defined as VC funded internet/software startups valued over $1Bn, but mostly referred to private billion dollar tech startups) but includes any startup that passed the $1Bn in valuation, whether through a public offering, acquisition, or in private financings, and not only in software/tech sectors, but any other industries (biotech, pharma, health, energy, space, hardware, finance, etc.) that are creating something new and can be considered to be a startup. It does not include holding companies, investment companies, consulting, oil & gas refineries, etc.

Disclaimer: The data may not be 100% accurate. The errors could be due to a lack of publicly available data, lack of historical context, survivorship bias, mistakes in my judgment, and a variety of other biases and sources of error. The point of this study is to portray trends, not exact numbers. I am a VC at DCVC (Data Collective), but this work was done on my own time and leveraged my own work. It may mention DCVC companies or outcomes but in no way is intended to promote them, nor was directed in any way by my colleagues there. Also please note that this study is not a causation study (simply because there’s no way to make a control group) so it should be read as a review of the state of these companies, not a suggestion of what leads to a higher probability of success, what founders or investors should do.

Here are 50 things I learned:

The “Super Founders” of Yesterday Create the Billion Dollar Companies of Today

The word “Serial Entrepreneur” has been misused and doesn’t mean much anymore, so here’s a suggestion for something concrete.

“Super Founder”: Founder with at least one previous exit over $50M or whose company generated/is generating $10M+ Annual Revenues. Paper valuations not to be included.

In some of the charts below I show a strong correlation between being a “Super Founder” and founding a billion dollar company.

I have specifically looked at the co-founders separately, i.e. I have separated the founding CEO from the other co-founders as I think they have different characteristics.

1) Two or Three Is The Most Common Number of Co-founders

It seems like having 2 or 3 co-founders is the ideal scenario, however, it is important to note that 20% of all billion-dollar startups have had a solo founder.

2) More than Half of the Founding CEOs Are Over 35 Years Old

One popular misconception is that billion dollar companies get started by college dropouts. There are certainly college dropouts in the list, but the bulk of these founders were between 24 to 36 years old when they were getting started.

3) Founding CTOs/CSOs Have An Even Wider Age Distribution

CxO Definition: I have defined CxO as the 2nd person in the rank, the person with the highest level of authority or importance after the CEO. Most often, specifically in tech sector, it is the CTO. In biotech/pharma, it is the Chief Scientific Officer or Chief Medical Officer. In more operational/traditional sectors, it is the president or COO.

If you compare this graph to the one for the CEOs, there seems to be a wider age distribution for the 2nd person. The graph has 2 peaks. First at the 28–32 years old age range, which is mostly CTOs of tech companies, and second, the 60–64 years old age range, which is mostly the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) or Chief Medical Officer (CMO) in pharmaceutical/biotech/health companies.

4) SaaS/Enterprise Founders Are Younger, Health/Pharma Founders Are Older, Consumer Founders Are Not Just Millennials

As explained above, the younger founders are mostly doing enterprise SaaS and the older founders are mostly in healthcare/biotech/pharma or energy. Seems like consumer founders are at any age (which is perhaps against a misconception that only millennials get consumer!)

5) 50% Have Over 10 Years of Work Experience

The mode for tech companies is around 10 years of total work experience and for pharma/health companies around 28 years of work experience.

6) Directly Relevant Industry Experience Does Not Matter; It Matters Even Less For CxOs

Contrary to the popular belief, most founders don’t have any directly relevant work experience in the industry they are disrupting. There’s also a clear distinction between the CEO and CxO where the industry experience is even less relevant for the CxO.

However, this does not hold true in healthcare and biotech, where almost 80% of founding CEOs had directly relevant experience.

7) Almost 60% Are Repeat Entrepreneurs

As a VC, most founders we see come and pitch are first time entrepreneurs. However, based on this data, there’s a very high percentage of billion-dollar companies that are started by repeat entrepreneurs.

8) The Repeat Entrepreneurs Founded and Led a Couple of Startups Previously

It is a wide distribution, many were a founder for 2–3 years previously, and some founded multiple startups and led them for 20+ years. For many of them their first or even second startups failed.

9) Almost 70% of Repeat Entrepreneurs Had Previously Founded A Successful Company (Let’s Call Them “Super Founders”)

“Super Founder”: Founder with at least one previous real exit over $50M or generating $10M+ annual revenues. Paper valuations not to be included.

Of the CEOs and CxOs who were previously a startup founder, 70% of them had at least one previous successful startup founding experience.

10) Some of the Founding CEOs Had More Than One Successful Prior Exit

Not just one successful prior exit, but some of these “Super Founders” have had multiple successful prior exits.

11) Bachelors and MBAs Are The Most Common Degrees Among Founding CEOs

Although we can see a range of different education patterns, including MD, Ph.D., etc. Clearly more professors, PhDs, and MDs in healthcare/pharma.

12) Half of CxOs Went To Grad School (Mostly Technical)

More PhDs and Masters than MBAs in the 2nd person in rank.

13) As Many Technical CEOs As Non-Technical CEOs

This has always been a debate; technical vs. non-technical founders. They have had a similar level of success as a CEO, and naturally, the CxOs are much more technical. Please note that for a pharma/biotech company, being technical refers to being sufficiently scientific in bio/medicine.

And while this seems to go against intuition, when the 1st person in rank was non-technical, the second person in rank had a higher chance of being non-technical too!

14) The Founders Had Previously Worked In Tier 1 Companies

If the founders had worked in a corporate environment before (many of them had only worked for themselves!) they had worked in a Tier 1 corporate previously.

15) Google, Oracle, and IBM Are the Biggest Billion Dollar Founder Producers

Yellow indicates founding CEO and purple is founding CxO. Facebook and Cisco have generated many CTOs, McKinsey and Microsoft have generated many CEOs.