Unlocking Unicorns with Michael Bervell
Creating more than consuming, non-fiat alternatives, capturing fleeting thoughts, and showing up
Michael Bervell is a Ghanaian-American angel-investor, entrepreneur, and author. He is the youngest president of the Harvard Club of Seattle, blogger for 750,000 people at BillionDollarStartupIdeas.com, author of “Unlocking Unicorns,” and works at M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund).
We would love to hear about your journey. Why entrepreneurship? Why did you decide to write a book?
Blogging daily was a great reason to stay creative after working at Microsoft and being pretty bored in my day job. Within the first 3 months of blogging, I had a total of 500 views (3-4 per day) and I was ecstatic, especially when strangers from random parts of the world found it. One day a reader reached out to me (I get about 3-4 of these per week): he was about my age and we had a great conversation. Towards the end he asked if I’d ever consider writing a book, and mentioned that he was writing one. He then connected me to his professor at Georgetown and publisher. Next thing I knew I was in the class, writing a book, focused on where my readers were primarily located: India, Africa, and the Middle East.
Do you have a framework for how you live your life?
Learn in my 20s, Earn in my 30s, Return in my 40s (& 50s, & 60s, & 70s). My motto since 2020 has been “create more than I consume” and I just spent the last 9 months creating very deeply. Currently, for the first half of September, I’m leaning into nothingness then leaning into consumption. I have been fascinated with the Stoic philosophy and writing of people like Epictitus: he wrote the enchiridion (The Enchiridion by Epictetus (mit.edu)). I’ve been on “go-mode” through travel and writing, so it’s nice to sit back and recover as I re-evaluate and plan for my next 12 months. For me, creativity takes space and also requires inspiration.
Now that you have published your book (congrats!), how do you spend your time these days?
I’ve been reading and writing about other topics and trying to put action to my philosophy “bet-on-it”:
LoT VOT (Long-term Venture Options Trading): my options trading strategy which I’m developing and running through Robinhood. Watching dozens of lectures on finance (I’ve loved Robert Shiller’s 2011 Yale lectures on financial markets in the wake of the 2008 crash and Andrew Lo’s 2008 MIT lectures that were filmed during the crash) as well as reading some of the original texts of Economics (older ones like The Communist Manifesto, The Wealth of Nations, and newer ones like Poor Economics and Donut Economics). Ultimately I want to build and implement some of my own theories based on theirs.
NFTs: purchasing and supporting amazing artists like Wheel Cards, the first NFT project about accessibility. Also pushing to the bring the idea that art needs to be touched, held, and seen (I’m a proud owner of some of Damien Hirst’s first and so far only NFT drop, “The Currency.”)
Community through food: experimenting with the launch of a new business, Saute -- a private dining-community to eat home-cooked meals.
You focus on billion dollar companies. Are there any soon-to-be unicorns who have particularly caught your eye?
All the companies I invest in as an angel investor!
Zette, a subscription paywall-busting extension for news (January 2021)
ChipBrain, emotionally intelligent AI for sales conversations (February 2021)
WHYM, text message purchasing platform to replace email marketing (April 2021)
Payhippo, financing for SMBs in Africa through AI for credit worthiness (June 2021 & September 2021)
Morty, physical experience scheduling starting with escape rooms (August 2021)
Marriage Pact, cupid meets data-science for college-aged students (est. October / November 2021)
But seriously, outside of that I’m super interested in the decentralized finance space especially as it relates to emerging economies. Not sure if you’ve heard of Axie Infinity (here’s a quick description: Infinity Revenue, Infinity Possibilities - by Packy McCormick - Not Boring by Packy McCormick) which is a play-to-earn game that allows people to make some $20+ per day just from playing games and selling the in-game assets. For many in the developing world who used to make $5, it actually makes sense for them to play games rather than actually work. Economically, they can quadruple their income if they have enough to pay for the startup costs. There have even been companies that loan computers to people to play and make a commission off the earnings per day. Fascinating emerging business models. Another similar phenomenon is Venuzelan Runescape players who would rather hold currency in Runescape gold than their own hyperinflated local currency. How will unstable economies shift as globalized ecosystems create new, non-fiat (government issued) alternatives? (read this cool article if you’re interested in learning more). I’m not sure which company will capitalize on this space: the game creators? The arbitrage traders who regulate the markets? Someone else entirely? But it’s an emerging space ripe for disruption.
How did you select these founders? Who didn’t make the final list?
I pulled together a list of all the billion dollar corporations in South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Unfortunately some of these regions (South America, Africa, and the Middle East in particular) each had less than a dozen.
One of my first criteria was: is there enough public information on this person that I can go on a 100-hour rabbit hole to understand their life? Often, even if the company was fascinating, the founders were private.
Sifting through founders’ public profiles got me thinking: would you rather be a loud millionaire or a quiet billionaire? What if the question was inverted: a quiet millionaire or a loud billionaire? Seemed in my research that regardless of the answer, the best people to write about were those who were “loud” in the sense that they had and maintained a public image of some sort
You dedicate your book to the 750K readers of your blog. Who are your readers? Why do they read?
They’re from all over the world! Just in the first week of launching my book I’ve sold copies in 5 different countries. 5!! That’s crazy: imagine doing this same book launch a decade ago or even two decades ago. For me, a 23-year-old, to sell a book on 5 continents would have been unheard of. Nonetheless, the internet has done that.
But, I digress, the book is dedicated to my readers because they have been my social pressure for writing my blog. If I don’t write for a day, I feel guilty: every day thousands of people visit my website because I’ve made a promise to them. “Startup Ideas Daily.” If I don’t deliver, I’m not only letting myself down but I’m letting all of them down.
Sometimes it’s hard to conceptualize just how large the social pressure is, but it really motivates me. Imagine this: how many people do you think went to Kanye West’s DONDA listening concert? Or the average Taylor Swift concert in 2019? Well for Kanye the answer is 40,000 and for Taylor Swift she broke records for concerts in 2019 with 67,000. That’s how many people read my blog every quarter. Every 3 months, I’m writing to a “Kanye West” or “Taylor Swift” sized audience. Thinking like that, not writing is actually more daunting than sitting my butt in a chair for an hour to share my thoughts. I dedicate the book to them because without me imagining them in the stands watching me write on a stage, I really don’t think I would have had the motivation to finish the project: especially as it got more and more difficult.
You say that "This book is not about the American Dream.” Who is the target reader for your book?
I really try to juxtapose the assumption that “the best startups come from America” with the reality that this might not be the case in half a century. In my eyes, the target reader is someone who wants to look ahead of the curve and around the corner to see what’s coming next. As a founder, investor, or even just a savvy business-person this, to me, is an extremely necessary skill. It’s not a book about “how to get rich and retire early through entrepreneurship”: it’s much more existential. It asks “what implicit bias do you bring to the word ‘entrepreneur’?” And uses examples to open eyes to alternative definitions. I suppose calling it “Unlocking Unicorns” is the hook that makes someone think “here are all the secrets I’m going to learn” when in reality, the secret is to shift your thinking from the ground up.
Your book is heavily based on second-hand interviews, requiring you to listen to "hundreds of hours of podcasts, direct interviews, keynote speeches, panel discussions, and team meetings.” What was the process like in reviewing that content and developing your own thesis from other people's interpretations, rather than the source itself?
I once met Gay Talese in a 12-person journalism class at Harvard. For those who don’t know him, he’s an absolute legend. He was a journalist for The New York Times and Esquire magazine during the 1960s and he helped to define contemporary literary journalism. I fell in love with profile writing after meeting Talese and after this journalism class and decided to do an independent study with the professor of the class (Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the new york times). She really opened my eyes to a whole world of journalism that I didn’t know about: you can really just follow people around and write about their lives, because even something as simple as that has insights into the human condition. It was so ontological, so simple, and so tied to being that I just couldn’t fathom it.
One thing about Jill’s and Gay’s philosophy felt outdated to me though: why do I physicallyhave to stay in the room with an individual to learn from them? What about being in a specific space, at a specific time, in a specific room as a journalist led to unique insights? What if I could be in any place, at any time, in any room? Wouldn’t that actually lead to better stories? My process broke the traditional 4 dimensions of x-y-z-and time to create a new form of profile writing that I think is actually more representative of an individual. I followed people like Jack Ma for years (from a launch in 2001, to his first public speaking events, to his war with Ebay in 2004, and more) in ways that a profile writer simple wouldn’t be able to. All because of the permanence of the internet. I had “Dragon Fly eyes” that allowed me to zoom in to snapshots of my subjects lives for fleeting moments, in ways that a 1-hour interview just wouldn’t allow. Of course, the interviews helped give context but they also felt so distant in a way that the secondary snapshots did not.
You are focusing on Founders from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Where is South America?
This question is exactly the one I want every reader to ask when they read the book. It tells me that you’ve fallen into the type of thinking that I hoped to inspire about this book: who are we missing with our traditional stories of entrepreneurship? I suppose in some ways intentionally missing South America (situated in the global West but not traditionally “western”) was a result of space in the book and time constraints. But also, quite frankly, it was difficult to find unicorn companies with female founders in South America. Probably the best example is Christina Junqueria of Nubank’s (she was recognized by Fortune as one of the world’s most influential leaders under 40 years old). My hope is that for “Unlocking Unicorns 2” or “Unlocking Unicorns 3” that I’ll be able to write stories about these founders. Better yet, maybe I’ll inspire others to write about them as well.
During your time at Harvard, you carried around Moleskins, your “brain on a page,” and had daily prompts. What are some prompts our readers can think or write about to more tangibly explore the world around them?
I had tons of prompts for writing while in college and I think a big reason I did it was because I wanted to be able to read back on my thoughts on college (almost like a diary or journal), but wanted it to be in a form beyond just recounting a listicle of what I had experienced. So the prompts really helped. I did things like write a poem every day, learn a new vocab word and use it in conversation, asking people the same question and writing down everyone’s answers every day, etc. etc… There was a time in college that I stopped carrying my phone (about 9 months) and wouldn’t allow myself to bring it beyond my doorframe, but I never left my notebook or pen in my room: it came with me everywhere.
Luckily, I’m in good company: tons of other famous people have carried around notebooks too like RIchard Branson, Bill Clinton, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mark Twain, and more (The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men | The Art of Manliness). Probably the biggest lesson I learned is that if you have a thought, it’s most likely fleeting: if you want to wrestle it down, to capture it like a firefly in a jar, to reel it into the fishing net of the future you have to materialize it with ink and paper.
You were surprised that Jack Ma was only 5 foot 3 inches. What would readers find most surprising about you?
I joke that my favorite animal is a sloth or a koala because both of them love to sleep. Probably when you look at my resume or at all of my projects you’d expect that I sleep 3 hours a night and am always grinding, networking, talking to folks, you name it. But on the weekends, I try to sleep 12 hours a day. It’s not a way to catch up on sleep (if you’ve read Why We Sleep you’d know research shows that doesn't really exist), but it’s a way to force myself to meditate and stay in bed for extended periods of time, especially on the weekends. Even if I wake up at say 9am on a weekend, I’ll force myself to stay there until noon. Occasionally I doze back off or browse through my phone and read news articles. But the only thing I don’t do is get up. It’s a great time to de-stress and to make sure I give myself the space to not always be on.
How can readers be more mindful of and better leverage their own Guanxi (social network)? How should startup founders embrace strategic failures?
I think people often fail and think of each failure as a dot. Even if they learn, that learning happens in isolation. But, the purpose of the chapter on Guanxi is to show that failure should consist of a line: every failure (and subsequent learning) should be connected to another, ideally in a trajectory that leads towards less failure.
The same can be said about networks: startup founders or just people in general often think of their network as nodes that they are connected to. Think of it like one of those spinning rides that you’d see at a carnival. The ones that spin around super fast and are attached to a central beam. There’s one central node on the ground or in a very high place and a bunch of strings dangle off of it. If you cut the central node, all the strings fall apart and aren’t connected to each other at all. They’re effectively separate rides being propelled by a central location. This, I think, is how people think of their network. A bunch of individual people that they talk to. I would call that a dot-work. It’s not a net at all. Because none of the nodes you know are connected. The best networks are the ones that form a net, not a collection of dots. It’s a new way of thinking, but I really do think that to be useful to your network you have to connect people within it to each other on a regular basis. Your network is only as strong as the connections within it: and being a connector, I find, is the value-add of networking. If not for yourself, at least for others.
We know it's impossible to predict the future, but from the perspective of today, what do you want to be doing in 10 years?
I’d hope to be starting my second career at 33. Perhaps as a chef or as an investor or as a researcher. I think every decade I’d love to go back to 0 (like a game of chutes and ladders) and try it all again as a novice!
What advice would you give your younger self?
I feel like I’m already pretty young, so in this context my advice would best be suited in the school context. But probably the best piece of advice I realized early on that I would love to remind myself of is this: “Show up.” The world was created by people like you. Look at who you want to be and create a path to step into their audience and influence when they’re gone. I think of life a lot like sushi at an all you can eat sushi bar. Even if you replace one of the tempuras, another one will just fill its place. The CEO of Microsoft will eventually move on, then another CEO will take his place, then another CEO will take her place, and so on and so forth. If you want to be the next tempura to be the CEO, you have to be in the right position to be pushed to lead. So put yourself in the right position and when you’re there use your influence for good.
A question for our readers: would you rather be a loud millionaire or a quiet billionaire?
