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I'm a former mechanical engineer who along the way helped develop an invisibility cloak…
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Andy Chen shared thisMost billion-dollar companies take over a decade to build. We analyzed 350 U.S. tech IPOs and $1B+ acquisitions over the past 20 years in our Billion-Dollar Founder Study. Founding CEOs stay in the role for ~12 years on average. In the largest outcomes, it’s often 15+ years. You’re not choosing someone for the launch. You’re choosing someone for a decade of reinvention. This is why who you build with matters so much. If you're thinking about starting something and want to meet other founders, this is exactly the problem we’re trying to solve with Catalyst at Outcast Ventures.
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Andy Chen posted thisToday we’re excited to announce a shift in our investment strategy: We now exclusively back solo founders. No co-founders. No debates. No misalignment. No one to slow you down. Just pure, unfiltered vision. We’ve found this dramatically improves decision-making speed, eliminates conflict, and ensures every company has a single, clear voice. Also makes board meetings faster. One chair. One opinion. Early data is compelling: - 100% alignment on every decision - 0% disagreement on product direction - 0 awkward “who’s CEO?” conversations We believe this is the future of company building. Teams are overrated. Partnerships are messy. It should only take one hand to clap. History will show the best companies are built alone. Enjoy April 1st! 😇
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Andy Chen shared thisThe AI generation may build companies 10x larger than those before it. We analyzed 350 U.S. tech IPOs and $1B+ acquisitions over the past 20 years, plus the most valuable private companies today. Every platform shift creates a new generation of outsized founders. The 1980s cohort rode mobile and cloud. Early signals suggest founders born in the 1990s, hitting their prime in the age of AI, could build companies an order of magnitude larger. Youth isn't the advantage. Building at the start of a new platform shift is. At Outcast Ventures, we believe the best founding teams of the AI era are being formed right now.
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Andy Chen shared thisWhere you go to school doesn’t determine how big your company becomes. We analyzed 350 U.S. tech IPOs and $1B+ acquisitions over the past 20 years in our Billion-Dollar Founder Study. Stanford clearly over-indexes in raw founder count, which is not surprising given their proximity to Silicon Valley, the density of venture capital, and strong peer networks. Ilya Strebulaev’s research on over 3,200 unicorn founders, finds a similar concentration at the top, with Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton producing the most unicorn founders by raw count. But raw count is only half the story. When isolating the top 5% of exits by valuation, Stanford shows up two times while many elite institutions do not appear at all. Also, founders from top schools and everyone else had the same median exit: $2.6B. Pedigree helps with access. It doesn’t determine scale. What matters more: team, timing, and endurance. If you're thinking about starting something and want to meet other founders, this is exactly the problem Outcast Ventures is trying to solve with Catalyst.
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Andy Chen shared thisIf you want your kid to be a billionaire, name them… Michael. We analyzed 350 U.S. tech IPOs and $1B+ acquisitions over the past 20 years in our Billion-Dollar Founder Study. The most common billion dollar founder name is Michael/Mike as it shows up more than any other name, followed by David, Scott, and John. Your name is not an exit strategy. More likely, it simply reflects the demographics of the founder population. Many founders in this dataset were born in the 1960s through 1980s, when a relatively small set of names dominated in the US. 📈 Read the full study here: https://lnkd.in/gMtgqW5t 🤝 Apply to Catalyst by 4/6 - Program for top 1% builders to meet their co-founder: https://lnkd.in/g3iwrMsq
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Andy Chen shared thisBuilding a company is a learned skill. We analyzed 350 U.S. tech IPOs and $1B+ acquisitions over the past 20 years in our Billion-Dollar Founder Study. Founders with prior startup experience built companies with 41% higher valuations. A prior exit nearly doubled outcomes: $5B vs. $2.6B. Pattern recognition compounds. The second time looks very different than the first. At Outcast Ventures, we think a lot about how to pair experience with new talent through Catalyst.
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Andy Chen shared thisThe biggest companies are almost never built alone. We analyzed 350 U.S. tech IPOs and $1B+ acquisitions over the past 20 years in our Billion-Dollar Founder Study. Roughly 1 in 5 billion-dollar companies were solo-founded. In fact, Peter Walker's data at Carta shows that solo founding has exploded at the formation stage - rising from 18% of new startups in 2016 to 36% in 2025. Solo founders are starting more companies than ever, enabled by coding agents, making it easier to build products quickly. But at the very top, solo founders almost disappear. Of the 16 largest exits, only 1 was solo. They also take longer. Solo founders reach liquidity years later than teams. It’s why we focus on how the right teams come together at Outcast Ventures through our Catalyst program.
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Andy Chen shared thisThe best co-founder probably isn’t someone you’ve worked with before. We analyzed 350 U.S. tech IPOs and $1B+ acquisitions over the past 20 years in our Billion-Dollar Founder Study. Founders who hadn’t worked together built companies with 26% higher exit valuations. Familiarity feels safer. But the data suggests the edge comes from complementarity, not proximity. In fact, OpenAI’s core founding team never worked together at the same companies. Sam and Elon assembled researchers from academia and major tech companies over a shared interest in Artificial General Intelligence. It’s why we built Outcast Ventures and Catalyst, to rethink how founding teams form. 📚️ Read the full study here: https://lnkd.in/gMtgqW5t 🤝 Apply to Catalyst by 4/6 - Program for top 1% builders to meet their co-founder: https://lnkd.in/g3iwrMsq
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Andy Chen shared thisI’ve evaluated thousands of founding teams behind some of the largest exits in tech. The biggest exits share patterns most founders overlook. The first one is counterintuitive. Founders who hadn’t worked together built companies with 21% higher valuations. Amy Lin and I just published an article in Fast Company about the Billion-Dollar Founder Study. Every U.S. tech IPO and $1B+ acquisition over 20 years. 350 companies. We reconstructed how each founding team actually came together. The data challenges a common assumption. Familiarity feels safer. But the best teams aren’t built from proximity. They’re built from complementarity. The clearest pattern beyond that: building a company is a learned skill. Founders with prior startup experience built companies with 41% higher exit valuations. A prior exit on the team nearly doubled the median exit value from $2.5B to $5B. Scaling a company is a learned skill. Hiring at pace, navigating boards, knowing when to push vs. sell. Founders who’ve been through it recognize the patterns faster. The data also reinforced something I've felt strongly about: solo founders face a structural disadvantage at scale. They can absolutely build valuable companies as roughly 20% of billion-dollar outcomes in our dataset were started by a single founder. But they nearly vanish at the top. Of the 16 largest exits in our dataset, only 1 was solo-founded. The finding I keep coming back to is timing. The biggest exits happen when a founder reaches their prime during a platform shift. The 1980s cohort rode mobile and cloud. Early signals suggest the 1990’s generation could produce companies 10x larger than those from prior waves. Amy Lin and I started Outcast Ventures because we believe the best founding teams of the AI era haven’t been formed yet. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be sharing daily insights from the Billion-Dollar Founder Study on what actually drives the biggest outcomes. This study is how we think about who builds what’s next. 📝 Op-ed with Amy Lin in Fast Company: https://lnkd.in/gQnbev76 📚️ Full study: https://lnkd.in/gMtgqW5t 🤝 Apply to Catalyst by 4/6 - Program for top 1% builders to meet their co-founder: https://lnkd.in/g3iwrMsq
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Bret Reckard thank you thank you!! It’s been quite a journey. Here’s when life was much simpler. Daniel Portillo Flo Thinh Chialtas Ravi Pindiproli
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Andy Chen liked thisAndy Chen liked thisTwo years ago, I joined Verily because I believed the biggest problem in healthcare wasn't generating data — it was making it useful. Today that conviction has a $300M exclamation point behind it, which I am incredibly grateful for. Verily just closed a major investment round led by Series X Capital. We are now Verily Health Inc. — an independent precision health company. What earned this moment was the strategic bet that precision health requires a unified platform between messy real-world health data and the clinical decisions that depend on it. That’s what Pre is: the data and AI backbone that now connects everything we do on top of a single data model. It powers the NIH’s All of Us Researcher Workbench. It’s the foundation underneath Lightpath’s chronic care programs and Verily Me’s consumer health experience. And it’s what made partnerships with Samsung, Salesforce, and NVIDIA possible — not as integrations bolted on after the fact, but as extensions of a shared data architecture that was designed to be open and interoperable from day one. This hasn't been a linear path, as Stephen Gillett has said. Hard calls were made. But our team — the Veeps — showed extraordinary grit through a real transformation, and this milestone belongs to them. The capital is only part of the story. The structural change matters just as much. Precision health doesn't belong to any single technology ecosystem — it requires partners across devices, enterprise software, cloud infrastructure, and clinical delivery to work together on shared data. As an independent company now, Verily can be that connective layer. The partnerships we've built with Samsung, Salesforce, and NVIDIA are early proof of what that looks like in practice, and I think we're just scratching the surface.
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Andy Chen liked thisAndy Chen liked thisTalking to your target customers is one of the most important things you can do as a startup founder. Here's why: When you're building, you go into deep focus. Heads down, grinding, living inside the problem. Cillian Murphy once talked about how after months of filming a role, snapping out of character is one of the hardest things to do. Building a startup is like that. You're so deep in it that pulling yourself out, even for a conversation, feels like breaking character. But that's exactly when you need to. At Popcorn, we were moving fast, feeling the pain point vividly, and building a comms product we wanted for ourselves. We thought we knew exactly what we were solving... until we started demoing it more actively. One target customer said: "this product could solve this architectural problem we have." A completely different use case than what we were building for. We iterated on the demo and took that to another customer. They said it would be great if it could run on a weekly basis - automatically updating it against a repo. 2 conversations and suddenly our product was solving more use cases than we ever imagined. Today, this happens in almost every call. Now our product isn't just poised to disrupt team communications. It disrupts docs, wikis, and a handful of other productivity tools along with it. Funny how sometimes the most important thing you can do is let yourself get a little unfocused. That's when you can see the bigger picture.
Experience & Education
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Outcast Ventures
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Volunteer Experience
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Member Board of Directors
San Francisco SPCA
- Present 7 years
Animal Welfare
The mission of the San Francisco SPCA is to save and protect animals, provide care and treatment, advocate for their welfare. As the fourth oldest humane society in the U.S. and the founders of the No-Kill Movement, the SF SPCA has always been at the forefront of animal welfare.
I am on the executive committee and chair the nominations and governance committee.
My wife and I have two adopted cats - a Siamese mix named Sumo and Himalayan mix named Miso. They are our landlords. -
Member Board of Directors
Challenge Success
- 4 years
Education
Board Director for Challenge Success, an educational nonprofit within the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
Challenge Success works with schools across the world by providing them resources to help children regain their balance, strengthen their sense of self, increase motivation and critical thinking skills, and learn how to deal with the inevitable challenge of life. To date, we have served almost 1,000,000 students in over 130 school communities.
You can read more here:…Board Director for Challenge Success, an educational nonprofit within the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
Challenge Success works with schools across the world by providing them resources to help children regain their balance, strengthen their sense of self, increase motivation and critical thinking skills, and learn how to deal with the inevitable challenge of life. To date, we have served almost 1,000,000 students in over 130 school communities.
You can read more here: http://www.challengesuccess.org/about/impact/by-the-numbers/
Projects
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KPCB Fellows
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See projectThe Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Fellowship Program offers top U.S. college and graduate students a chance to work inside innovative Silicon Valley startups. The three-month summer program is focused on engineering and design. A new year-long program is focused on product management.
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