The unfair advantage by Ash Ali and Hassan kubba

‘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, then venturing abroad to start Washplus, an on-demand mobile laundry app ‒ the first of its kind in Dubai. With Fare Exchange, we developed smart software and digital marketing systems that took taxi bookings which were then serviced by local taxi companies. This was in 2010, years before Uber entered the scene. I grew it at blinding speed, from £0 to £25 million in bookings revenue in just three years – with only five full-time staff. My next startup, Washplus, became Dubai’s fastest-growing laundry and dry-cleaning startup. I developed the reputation for being a ‘growth hacker’, someone who’s good at growing a startup really, really fast. Meanwhile, with the hard-earned money I’d made from my own startup