A new book aims to blow up assumptions about the best founding teams 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.