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Aug 11 2020

Building a unicorn is a game🦄

#126:
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Apparently, if you build a unicorn in this game, you can build a unicorn in real life. I personally know only one person who has successfully done that and he is already on track to build the next big startup. So, send me a screenshot if you ace this. You’re definitely going into our hall of fame.
However, can winning this game really determine whether you can build a unicorn? Here’s looking at all the investors out there 👀
But running a startup might actually be like a game. As your company grows, the levels get harder. Suddenly there are various different challenges that take you by surprise and you never know when a monster competitor might eat you up! 
Personal Note: I don't think a game can determine if you build a unicorn or not. 
It takes a lot more to build a sustainable value-add business, so be the winner in that game.
ज्ञान
After my house was vacated by all the contractors, (after 3–4 months of what seemed like a war-zone), it finally started to look more like home. The thing I was most excited about while moving in was to create a place for everything and put everything in its place.
Call it my occupational hazard — as a UX professional, when I started organising, I couldn’t help relating every drawer I set up, to how we use the same principles in designing our digital products. It struck me, that the explanations of fundamentals of experience design can be done by most common, the most relatable, the easiest and yet the most complex part of the house- THE KITCHEN. If we equate it to any digital property, we can draw clear parallels between the two.
Imagine giving your credit card, mobile phone, and laptop to somebody you’ve never met, and asking them to fill your shoes for a day—working your job, doing the shopping, and even picking up your kids from daycare. It’s risky. It’s frightening. It’s frightening because it’s risky.
It’s also not so far from the job employers need to do when hiring remote colleagues. Somehow we’ve got to transform a person we’ve never met working from their couch to an employee we trust with the company credit card, social media account, or keys to our servers.
Hiring remote employees is as much about establishing mutual trust, as it is assessing for skill or cultural fitness.
Value is created through innovation, but how much of that value accrues to the innovator depends partly on how quickly their competitors imitate the innovation. Innovators must deter competition to get some of the value they created. These ways of deterring competition are called, in various contexts, barriers to entry, sustainable competitive advantages, or, colloquially, moats. There are many different moats but they have at their root only a few different principles. This post is an attempt at categorizing the best-known moats by those principles in order to evaluate them systematically in the context of starting a company.
I am going to try to be focus on only the barriers that seem to have structural causes. This excludes things like management talent, founder vision, company culture, and the like. These things are often not imitated, but not because they are not imitable: in many cases they are simply indications of an apparently rare competence. And while competence may be the ultimate competitive advantage to an individual, it is the property of the individual, not the company. (There are some things about company culture that are more than individual competence, and we’ll talk about them later.)
Warning: This is a post about branding, but I’m no brand expert. For most of my career, any mention of the word brand made me uncomfortable. I figured it was a fine line between “brand exercise” and “total waste of time.”
I was forced to confront my branding heebie-jeebies five years ago, when I joined Google Ventures. Previously, I’d always worked at big companies (Google, Microsoft, Oakley) with established brands. But at GV, I found myself working with startups who were thinking about their brands for the first time. They were designing logos, creating visual identities, and naming their companies — in other words, making a lot of big decisions.
Startup classifieds, events and more..
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Quotable
"We do not stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing."  

- Benjamin Franklin
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