This is trend following radio where great thinking comes alive.

Nobel Prize winners, legendary traders, bestselling authors, and the pros that know what drive us irrational human beings.

I am your host, Michael Coval.

Not filtered, raw, honest.

That's my passion.

My guest today did something really cool in the venture capital space, a big research project,

essentially looking at 30,000 data points on nearly every factor when it comes to startups.

And he found out all kinds of cool information that goes against the grain.

And to start with, whatever you might imagine about a Silicon Valley startup, a unicorn,

a super successful startup is probably incorrect.

For example, most unicorns, those once in a blue moon companies,

the founders have no industry experience. Is there an advantage to being a solo founder? Yes.

Are you disadvantaged if you are a solo founder? No, you're not. What about a non-technical

CEO? You're not disadvantaged either. The data doesn't bear it out. People might have personal

opinions, but what Ali, Tomasab, my guest did today was look at the data. Less than 15% of

startups went through any kind of accelerator program.

And here's the kicker that really strikes me. And it's very much the Google story.

Over half of the startups had strong competitors when they were starting. So being first to market, the first with a great idea, that doesn't actually matter.

Again, my guest today, Ali Tomasab took all of this information.

He put it into a really cool book called Superfounders, what data reveals about billion

dollar startups.

Of course, somebody like me who's into trend following and data, because people think that you just get to have personal opinions about the

...