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

By Michael Bervell

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 revolu

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637303283

Book preview

UnlockingUnicorns_1660x2560_eBook.jpg

Early Praise for Michael Bervell’s Unlocking Unicorns

Michael has crafted a unique, must-read collection of stories from startup founders around the world. Backed by interviews and relatable stories, it’s like How I Built This by Guy Raz, but with even more diverse founders, nuanced findings, and evidence-based business advice.

— Rachel Greenwald, New York Times Best Selling Author, Founder & CEO of Elevated Connections

Michael’s eloquent writing uncovers truly new insight and gives actionable steps that every investor, operator, and founder can incorporate to level up their work.

— Jessica Li, Venture Partner at Predictive VC

Everyone should read Unlocking Unicorns to learn from some of the most disruptive entrepreneurs making an impact on a global scale. Michael has uncovered the backstories of international legends. It’s a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs and investors interested in the next unicorn.

— Ayushi Sinha, Co-founder of Prospect Student Ventures, Princeton’s first student-led venture capital fund

Refreshing. Motivating. And, for the diaspora, empowering.

— Mutesa Sithole, Global Content Lead at Infobip (Croatia’s first tech Unicorn)

One of the joys of reading is to discover unheard stories: Michael reveals real treasures on every page. Travel is one way to experience new cultures, ideas, and perspectives; reading is the next best thing. Through Unlocking Unicorns, you can’t help but see the way the world works in ways you’ve probably never thought of before.

— Patrick Lyons, Founder & CEO of The Lyon Shred and The Online Coach Academy, Mechanical Sourcing Engineer at Microsoft

Unlocking

Unicorns

Unlocking Unicorns

TEN STARTUP STORIES FROM DIVERSE BILLION-DOLLAR FOUNDERS IN AFRICA, ASIA, AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Michael Bervell

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Michael Bervell

All rights reserved.

Unlocking Unicorns

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

ISBN

978-1-63730-326-9 Paperback

978-1-63730-327-6 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-328-3 Ebook

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the more than 750,000 readers, viewers, subscribers, and unsubscribers of my blog, BillionDollarStartupIdeas.com

Your eyeballs and comments inspired me to write every day for more than 600 days. Thank you for following my creative journey and giving me the confidence to publish my digital thoughts in a physical form.

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

Introduction

Elias Torres carried a backpack with him when he first moved to the United States. With his jet-black hair and silver wire-rimmed glasses, Elias looked just like every other Nicaraguan immigrant looking to escape a civil war.

But he was different.

His backpack contained a few of his prized possessions: a brochure from the University of California about computer science and photos of his wheelchair-bound father. Smiling and full of energy, Elias emigrated to Florida with his mother and two younger brothers. Despite being only seventeen, Elias was the man of the house. He balanced being a high school student in a country where he didn’t know the language with working full-time at two jobs to support his family. Elias’ eyes soften as he tells me about his career growth:

My aunt got me and my mother a job cleaning office spaces at night. Then I applied for a McDonald’s job and started working there early on. At McDonald’s, I was getting paid $4.75 an hour: that was the minimum wage at the time. Then I got a raise for a dime. My mentality at that moment and for the next following years was that everything in my life was an hourly wage. It started at $4.75, then $4.85, then I went to Albertsons $5.10, then I went to Bank of America and it was $6.25, and the second year of the internship it was $7.25. Finally, I got a job at IBM, and it was like $15 an hour. At the time, it just blew my mind.¹

He laughs in retrospect. Calculating his net worth in hours now would blow his whole family’s mind.

Elias had hustle: he was constantly rubbing two quarters together to make a dollar. After studying business at the University of South Florida, his fire helped him to explode forward: becoming a technical lead for IBM’s CIO Office Innovation Team; obtaining a Master’s in Computer Science from Harvard; and creating his first company Performable, which he eventually sold to HubSpot for $20 million.²

Today, Elias runs Drift. It’s a conversational marketing and sales platform that has over 150,000 business customers and is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies of all time. In July 2020, Elias’ company was valued at over $360 million. Not bad, for a child escaping a civil war.

Due to generational wealth, Elias’ children will never need to experience the struggles that their father did. By all measures, Elias’ story is a great example of the American Dream; an immigrant who came from nothing, started working at McDonalds, and now has enough money to buy the store that used to employ him. It’s rags to riches.

This book is not about the American Dream.

While it features rags to riches stories about individuals who have created Unicorn Companies (companies valued at $1 billion or more), it is not even about America.

According to the State Department, only 43 percent of Americans have a passport. That figure is increasing at merely 2-3 percent per year. While the whole purpose of the American Dream is for immigrants to breed innovation on American soil, less than half of all Americans want to be an immigrant themselves, even if only to travel for vacation. The flip side of the American Dream is overindulged American exceptionalism: expecting and believing that the United States has the best startups, the best ideas, and the best conditions for innovation globally.

This is simply not true.

Over the last decade, the percentage of Chinese internet users as a share of population has more than doubled, rising from 22.6 percent in 2008 to 59.6 percent in 2018. That accounts for 792 million people: more than twice the population of the United States and twenty times the population of Canada. This makes China the world leader of internet users.

It’s not just China that is outpacing American growth. India is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets for digital consumers, with 560 million internet subscribers in 2018, second only to China.³ This growth is true on the continent of Africa as well. In the past month, more people in Africa accessed the internet than did people in Latin America, North America, or the Middle East.⁴ There were 525 million internet users in Africa, 447 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 328 million in North America, and 174 million in the Middle East.⁵

The world is changing. It’s magnitudes larger than The American Dream. While innovation can come from anywhere and the United States will continue to produce successful entrepreneurs like Elias Torres, learning the stories of non-American entrepreneurs who have seen success in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is imperative to understanding tomorrow’s innovation. Building the billion-dollar companies of the future will require an intimate understanding of the next billion users.

I realized this firsthand while meeting with Asian technology executives at the World Internet Conference in 2017. As one of four American college-aged delegates selected to attend, I was able to sit down over meals with technology executives like Jack Ma (Alibaba), Robin Li (Baidu), and Ren Zhengfei (Huawei). I probably met more billionaires during that four-day conference than most people see their whole lives.

What struck me in these conversations was that ideas, while valuable, are infinite. What sets successful entrepreneurs apart from unsuccessful ones is execution. This book is the key to learning the habits of execution from the rare outliers in emerging markets who have done it already before. It focuses on the untold stories that you won’t hear in traditional American business literature to provide insights for building successful startups that transcend traditional, Western business school canon.

Currently I work as a venture capitalist at Microsoft where my job is literally to give people millions of dollars to build their ideas. Hearing hundreds of pitches, seeing thousands of businesses, conducting due diligence on million-dollar deals, and working directly with CXO entrepreneurs have taught me one thing: anyone can make a startup and be successful if they unlock the habits of Unicorn founders.

Whether you are hoping to build a profitable company, want to learn about what the world will be like in ten years, or are just interested in international business, these stories will open your eyes to the world. How did a brewmaster become the first self-made Indian female billionaire (Chapter 2)? How did one Asian entrepreneur invent Google before Larry Page (Chapter 7)? How did an Indian entrepreneur build a hotel company the size of Marriott in 7.5 percent of the time (Chapter 8)?

These stories and others have been translated to English and packaged for you.

Over the last nine months, I embarked on a journey to directly interview successful billion-dollar founders from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. While I was able to talk with many of these executives directly, in cases where I was not granted an interview, I adopted a strategy of secondary interviews. This tactic (which I learned while conducting independent research with Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the New York Times) required that I listen to hundreds of hours of podcasts, direct interviews, keynote speeches, panel discussions, and team meetings to recreate the archetype of the ten founders profiled in this book. I traced digital breadcrumbs to recreate the pie. After all, what would these founders tell me in a one-hour meeting that I couldn’t learn through watching more than forty hours of their already available public interviews?

Organized into three parts, this book reflects the three phases that African, Asian, and Middle Eastern unicorn entrepreneurs traverse to create their companies. Phase one is exploration to discover an idea worth pursuing (Chapters 1-3), phase two is refinement of this idea into a business (Chapters 4-7), and phase three is execution to scale (Chapters 8-10). In studying the ten entrepreneurs profiled in this book, you will develop a lens of clarity about how these ten archetypes and personalities have navigated the three phases to develop a combined $10+ trillion in global economic value.

Forget about the American Dream. Instead, Unlock Unicorns.

---

1 Bervell 2020

2 Alspach 2012

3 McKinsey 2019

4 Business Insider 2019

5 Campbell 2019

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 learning the main lessons of a chapter before reading it, skim this section at the end of each chapter for a quick summary.

Chapter 1:

1,001 Failures

Jack Ma is a failure.

He’s a former English teacher; co-founder of the Alibaba Group; and according to Forbes, he’s the richest man in China. Founded in 1999, Alibaba, his company, boasts 960 million annual active customers (twice the combined populations of the United States, Canada, and Mexico); 86,000 employees; and $60 billion in annual revenue.⁶ But, despite conventional measures of success, even Jack describes himself as a mistake-ridden failure.⁷

We have made thousands of mistakes! Jack says with glee. As an entrepreneur, I don’t try to learn from other people about how they succeed, I try to learn from how people fail.⁸

He leaned in and gestured for