Adam Shuaib

All the unicorn founders we’ve met had a clear "point of origin" story; a moment that explains why they were compelled to start a company, and why nothing else would cut it. It’s a question that ve...

Analysing the founder profiles of every unicorn since 2000, almost every data point was counterintuitive. There was minimal evidence of founder-market fit; 60% had never worked in the same sector b...

Our interviews with hundreds of exited founders uncovered a pretty common background of early, frequent geographic displacement. We saw that the best leaders often spent their childhoods moving bet...

After two decades of investing, our biggest learning is that true outlier founders have something that is impossible to fake: deeply unconventional life choices and highly quirky personalities that...

Many of the best founders share a trait that traditional hiring managers would see as a red flag: they have a very low need for social approval. Most people are terrified of looking like a fool or ...

Our research showed that top founders often spent their teenage years obsessed with a difficult craft like competitive gaming, a musical instrument or elite sports. Mastering a niche as a 15yo teac...

The founders worth betting on were often terrible employees. Many clashed with previous managers, didn’t follow instructions and quickly realised they were more effective than their boss. In the wr...

A significant portion of unicorn founders were rejected over 50 times before finding a VC willing to be anti-consensus. We met a unicorn founder who was turned down 100 times during their seed rais...

Most great founders have a clear point-of-origin story that explains why they were compelled to start a company, and why nothing else would cut it. But 99% of VC interactions focus on what the comp...

Most startups don’t actually fail because the market is too competitive or because they run out of money; they fail because the founders quit too early. The ones who don’t quit often have something...

Across 5000+ founder meetings, the single rarest success trait we saw was pathological determination (<1% of founders). Having a good work ethic is not enough; these individuals possess a borderlin...

Every investor says they’re looking for outlier founders, until one actually cold emails them a deck. An entrepreneur with zero founder-market fit, who wasn’t employee number 8 at Google, no Stanfo...

Many of the unicorn founders we meet are fuelled by inner demons. There is a voice in their head that says they are not good enough, or an early memory of a parent/teacher telling them they would f...

One of the unspoken rules of VC is that blue-chip founder pedigree buys you time, credibility and the benefit of the doubt. But across 12yrs of data, we found that most unicorn founders were in fac...

One of the most revealing signals we found in outlier founders: they view their company as a pirate ship rather than a navy. This isn't just a stylistic choice; it reflects a fundamental refusal to...

One of the difficulties in evaluating a founder is deciding whether their confidence stems from genuine insight or instead from social adeptness/charisma. The former indicates a builder who has wre...

When we studied the founders who actually built generational companies, we noticed a strange psychological blend: they were simultaneously deeply humble and unapologetically arrogant. This isn't a ...

The personality type that repeatedly showed up in our research on unicorn founders wasn’t "leader" or “visionary.” It was "difficult". As children, we found most never did the group work activity ...

Over the last 6 years, we manually tagged 16,000 founders across a number of binary signals that indicated someone had lived outside the matrix: odd hobbies, extreme life choices, unusual upbringin...

After ten years of studying early-stage founders, the single rarest success trait we saw wasn’t genius or vision: it was pathological determination. Not the “I work hard” kind, but rather the “I wi...