What Actually Makes a Unicorn Founder?

(Hint: It's Not What You Think)

Here’s a question that keeps venture capitalists up at night: What separates the person who builds a billion-dollar company from everyone else?

For years, the answer seemed obvious. You needed the Stanford computer science degree, the McKinsey pedigree, maybe a stint at Google. You were probably 23, definitely male, and ideally had Mark Zuckerberg’s phone number. The pattern was so clear that investors built entire strategies around it.

Except the data says that pattern is almost entirely wrong.

When researchers analyzed over 1,000 unicorn founding teams, they found something startling: only 11% fit the traditional Silicon Valley archetype. The other 89% looked nothing like what VCs thought they were looking for.

So what actually predicts success?