Description
The Unfair Advantage – How You Already Have What It Takes To Succeed By Hasan Kubba & Ash
The winner of the UK’s Business Book of the Year Award for 2021, this is a groundbreaking exposé of the myths behind startup success and a blueprint for harnessing the things that really matter.
What is the difference between a startup that makes it, and one that crashes and burns? Behind every story of success is an unfair advantage.
But an Unfair Advantage is not just about your parents’ wealth or who you know: anyone can have one. An Unfair Advantage is the element that gives you an edge over your competition.
This groundbreaking book shows how to identify your own Unfair Advantages and apply them to any project. Drawing on over two decades of hands-on experience, Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba offer a unique framework for assessing your external circumstances in addition to your internal strengths. Hard work and grit aren’t enough, so they explore the importance of money, intelligence, location, education, expertise, status, and luck in the journey to success. From starting your company, to gaining traction, raising funds, and growth hacking, The Unfair Advantage helps you look at yourself and find the ingredients you didn’t realize you already had, to succeed in the cut-throat world of business.
ASH ALI is the co-founder of Uhubs, a skills training platform to help entrepreneurs and professionals. He sold his first internet business at age 19. With over 20 years of hands-on experience creating and growing startups, he has consulted, advised, and invested in hundreds of startups.
HASAN KUBBA is a specialist in technology startups, marketing, and fundraising. His TEDx talk titled Startups, Entrepreneurship and Unfair Advantages was voted highest ever on the Official TED subreddit.
‘How does a startup become so successful?’
As the first marketing director of Just Eat UK, and the
number 3 hire on the senior management team, I have been
asked this question over and over again. After the phenomenal £1.5 billion initial public offering (IPO) of our online food
ordering startup in 2014, people would ask:
‘Ash, you were there from the beginning. What is the
secret?’
My mind would spin in all different directions trying to
think of an accurate answer … Was it the idea? The technology? The ‘growth hacks’? The team? The timing? Maybe it
was just the sheer hard work and hustle that we put in? What
really led to one of the largest tech startup IPOs the UK had
seen in almost a decade?
We were touted as an extraordinary London-based success
story (launched originally in Denmark), and we got a lot of
attention. However, every answer I gave about the cause of
our success felt as if it was missing a crucial piece of the puzzle
… and I could never quite put my finger on it.
The beginnings of a theory for startup success began to
brew in the back of my mind as I moved on from Just Eat
and started a few other companies: first founding my own
fully bootstrapped (without external funding or investment)
startup called Fare Exchange, a private hire taxi platform,
