SMI #014: Columbus' Pitch Deck
It didn't mention anything about competition
Trying out a new, abbreviated format to supplement the usual fictional business cases. In the spirit of stealing ideas, it’s something I’ve stolen from someone smarter than myself.
The following is a taken from The Innovation Stack by Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square (correction: Block).
Columbus' was a bad guy with big balls
Christopher Columbus, the homicidal tyrant who initiated the two greatest crimes in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic slave trade, and the American Indian genocide, had some gonads making the pitch he did. He essentially said:
“I’m going to sail in a direction from which nobody has ever returned, toward a destination not on the map. I don’t know how long it will take or what we will discover. Give me money and ships and men who will die if I’m wrong”
-Jim McKelvey, The Innovation Stack
And he didn’t waste cycles comparing himself to anyone else
“Columbus wasn’t worried about his competition…he was worried about sailing off the edge of the earth”
-Jim McKelvey, The Innovation Stack
Looking left and right at all times - at other businesses in your space, colleagues in your department, siblings in your family - detracts from actually building something new. In fact, it can lull you into (counter-intuitively) building something similar. I try to remind myself to stop wasting time mapping out perceived competition, since:
Maps are for tourists, not explorers.
-Jim McKelvey, The Innovation Stack
If you like this new format, holler. I have a lot of similar stuff written down in notebooks that my wife is constantly attempting to throw away.