Wharton Fintech Podcast

Miguel Armaza sits down with Ali Tamaseb, Partner at DCVC, a VC fund that backs teams applying deep tech to transform giant industries. Ali is also a published author, having recently authored Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups, a book that 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 actually false. Ali Tamaseb began this project four years ago, trying to answer a single question: what was different, if anything, between startups that go on to become billion-dollar successes and those that raise VC funding but don’t succeed in that scale? Thousands of hours later, having manually collected 30,000+ data points, he was shocked with the result. The data rejected so many popular narratives that he decided to write a book based on the findings. In the process, Ali interviewed founders of many billion-dollar companies like Zoom, Instacart, GitHub, and Nest