Unlocking Unicorns

Ten Startup Stories from Diverse Billion-dollar Founders in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East

Michael Bervell

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781637303283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

Do you have the key to building a billion-dollar business in an emerging economy?

The entrepreneurs in this book do.

Unlocking Unicorns features diverse stories from successful billion-dollar startup founders in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Learn about how the internet is revolutionizing non-Western countries and corporations through stories that touch on:

• Philosophies such as "Guanxi" and mental models such as the "Regret Minimization Framework"
• The journeys of ten diverse entrepreneurs including Jack Ma (founder of AliBaba), Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (founder of Biocon), Mudassir Sheikha (founder of Careem), Bang Si-Hyuk (producer behind BTS), Cher Wang (founder of HTC), Mitchell Elegbe (founder of Africa's first billion-dollar FinTech company), and more
• Michael Bervell's three-part framework that can be applied within any industry focused on exploration, refinement, and execution.

Discover the mental models and characteristics that enabled founders in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to overcome and adapt to brain drain, leapfrogging technologies, location-based discrimination, and government unrest.

Unlocking Unicorns is the key to success for aspiring global founders or emerging economy investors who want to do business in the international, interconnected 21st century.

Part 1:
Exploration

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”

—Helen Keller

In college, I carried around Moleskin® notebooks with me everywhere I went. They were about the size of a credit card and as thick as two cracked iPhone Xs. I prided myself on buying pants with pockets to wrap my written thoughts snuggly alongside my engraved pen. Each notebook was two hundred blank pages. Lines would have been too restricting. Each varied in colors: black (freshman year), green (sophomore year), red (junior year), and yellow (senior year).

These notebooks were my brain on a page as I journeyed through Harvard.

Every semester I would choose a different prompt to inspire me to write daily:

•Freshman fall I recorded every dream I had.

•Freshman spring was a record of the life stories of every peer I had lunch with.

•Sophomore fall I found problems worth solving in the world.

•Sophomore spring my Moleskin® became a poker notebook: defining terms, recording wins, analyzing losses, developing betting strategies, and understanding the percentage-to-win ratios for different hands.

•Junior fall I learned one new vocabulary word every day.

•Junior spring I ideated on ways to optimize restaurant marketing in Harvard square.

•Senior fall I wrote one poem a day.

•Senior spring I started writing one business idea every day.

I always noticed a trend with these books: the first fourteen days were always the most difficult. Getting over the hump of writing something around a specific topic every day was a difficult task. I was forced to look for inspiration everywhere. The over-ripe banana in the dining hall became a poem on the decomposition of the human experience, and every class about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics caused me to question if poker really was the “good life.” Every interaction was colored by the notebook of the moment.

After about one hundred days of carrying each notebook, its color would change: worn down by the use, friction, or the weight of ideas. Those notebooks have seen drunk nights and date nights, washing machines and walking tours, networking calls and not-so-successful interview interrogations. They viewed my life in black and white: as objective as a camera’s lens and as private as the homunculi in my head.

“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”

—John A. Shedd

While all founders must embark on similar journeys to expand their world views before creating companies, the three founders you’ll read about in Part 1 are exceptional embodiments of exploration. They started by either intentionally or unintentionally exploring the world around them, and even as Unicorn company CEOs, continue to use their unique skills to succeed.

First is Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba who has more than 1,001 failures. Jack’s involuntary exploration through failure forced him to develop Guanxi and enabled him to strategically use his networks to grow Alibaba from an idea to an icon in the Chinese market.

Second is Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the failed medical school student who is now the only self-made female billionaire in India. Through-and-through, she is a contrarian who found business success by exploring and exploiting the realms of what was possible in a male-dominated India.

Third is Mitchell Elegbe, the founder of Interswitch, a Nigerian payments company valued at more than $1 billion and the first African-founded FinTech unicorn company on the continent. More than aimlessly exploring, Mitchell embraced hindsight, foresight, and insight to capitalize on Nigeria’s movement toward a cashless economy.

“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

—T.S. Eliot

While none of these three individuals may have carried around a Moleskin® notebook with business ideas or poetry, each has exhibited in his or her own way the importance of exploring the world before starting and while running their Unicorn companies.

Chapter Summary

Lesson 1.At the end of each chapter, you’ll find a chapter summary section that looks like this.

Lesson 2.Each chapter summary will pull out the three key lessons of the chapter.

Lesson 3.If you’re interested in learn...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part 1: Exploration
• Chapter 1: 1,001 Failures
• Chapter 2: Contrarian Challenger
• Chapter 3: Sanguine Seer
• Part 2: Refinement
• Chapter 4: The ABCs
• Chapter 5: Queen of Reframing
• Chapter 6: It Takes a Village
• Chapter 7: Pivot Player
• Part 3: Execution
• Chapter 8: Strategic Ambitions
• Chapter 9: Partnership Decacorn
• Chapter 10: Content-Market Fit
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix