Malcolm Gladwell: What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Underdogs

your new book David and Goliath is about underdogs defeating Giants so I'm wondering how this research was related to prior research you had done for books like outliers you know outliers is about understanding the kind of things that account for success and this is a book that does a similar kind of question but in a very different way it got affected when I was doing outliers I was struck by how often when successful people described their lives I counted what they've done they would talk about the things that went wrong or the things that were hard as opposed to the things that were easy or went right and so I decided to do another version of this question but starting with people's stories as opposed to broader rules and looking at this question of to what extent our can disadvantages be advantageous and vice-versa so sort of digging in a little deeper so the basic premise of the book is that the story we all think we know about David and Goliath isn't really how it went down so can you find that you always start with the cliche right so the cliche the standard story that is the symbol of underdogs is Davis defeat of Goliath and it turns out as a whole as is always the case it's a whole kind of literature around that story and the literature serves to undermine the notion that conventional interpretation David's sling is a devastating weapon it's one of the most feared weapons in the ancient world the stone that comes from his sling travels has to stop stopping power equivalent to a bullet from a 45 caliber pistol it's like serious weapon and to Goliath seems to be there's all kinds of weird suggestions about this in a biblical account but there are many medical experts who believe that Goliath is suffering from acromegaly which is a medical condition caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland which causes you to grow its accounts resize many Giants have acromegaly but it has a side effect which is that has it causes restricted site and Goliath in the biblical story does if you look closely sound like a guy who can't see so here we have a big lumbering guy way down with armor who can't see much more than a few feet in front of his face up against a kid running at him with a devastating weapon an Iraq traveling with the stopping power of a 45 caliber handgun that's not a story of an underdog and a favorite it's a very different kind of story david has tons of advantages in that battle they're just not obvious and that's that's what gets the book rolling is this notion that we need to do a better job of looking at what a advantage is how have you seen stories like this play out in the business world between startups and the Giant this has been I mean this is the classic story of the business world that in numerous occasions the very same thing that appears to make a company so formidable its size its resources service stumbling blocks when they're forced to respond in a situation to a situation where the rules are changing and where nimbleness and flexibility and adaptability are better attributes more useful attributes than resources and scope which is the story of david and black right that's David had nimbleness he could adapt to a situation he changed the rules he brought in a superior technology I mean it's a it's the same old so I think we see this all the time what's interesting is how difficult we find it to we still even after multiple examples find it difficult to grasp this lesson you know you know hewlett-packard still buys Compaq to use an example from years ago there is nothing there is no plausible argument to be made that they were a stronger company by getting bigger they were already very big what they needed to be was nimble do you get more nimble by acquiring you know so it's you could make this case of many many different mergers or classic example of this where people have a very narrow definition of advantage and I think that there are only good things to come from getting bigger and you know we know from academic research that the majority of mergers do not end up enhancing shareholder value why because bigness now as it was in the case of David and Goliath is a an overrated and under-examined attribute what were some of them were iconic stories of startups conquering giants that came across in your research like most of my books this book is it passes over it has many lessons for the world of business but I don't use specific business case studies in this book I mean they're obviously all around us but it's not a I didn't I chose to use my take my my case took my stories and examples from outside the world of business I do look the best perhaps the best one is the as a chapter on a truly brilliant innovator the guy who is largely responsible for curing Chadha leukemia and he's essentially an entrepreneur in the medical research world and that chapter is all about the importance of disagreeableness the idea that entrepreneurs are people who are defined not just by their creativity and their conscientiousness their ability to make real their ideas but they are also defined by the disagreeableness which is not obnoxiousness but rather as that word is defined by psychologists they are not people who require the social approval of their peers to go forward with an idea and that's a very rare trait very few people are truly disagreeable but you look at the really great disruptive innovators there are people who you know they are often vilified at a certain point in their you know this manner my profile was cast out almost was ostracized from his peers everyone thought what he was doing was not just crazy but barbarous it's very typical you know I give the example in the book of Inga VAR comp rod was the founder of Ikea you know in order to save IKEA at a certain point he really pioneers outsourcing in that his particular industry he takes his starts to make his furniture in Poland in 1961 and he is denounced for that because he went good imagine going to a communist country to make your product in at the height of the Cold War it said the only way you could do that is if you are indifferent to what your what the world says about you you know he would have been denounced on the 1961 equivalent of Twitter but he didn't care and that's the crucial part about why he was able to do this incredibly disruptive innovative thing because he wasn't someone who spent any time worrying about his reputation or anything like that do you think it's as much that entrepreneurs or underdogs don't care or that maybe the public isn't paying as much attention as they would be to the giant corporations the googles the apples or if 11 are they flying under the radar screen a little bit yeah it's probably some mixture of both although I mean in the case of the two examples I gave of a male fry rank my oncologist who did I work on leukemia and Comp rod they were very much in the public spotlight and did get in the Gretl amount of flak so there are times when an entrepreneur can do something privately but they merely you know the the the flack they're getting maybe something as simple as just within their own peer group you know when Sam Walton has his initial failure with with a retail store and then he goes back I think to his wife's to get money you know the world wasn't denouncing him but within his family he was the guy who lost all the money and was the failed businessman I mean and here he was trying to do it again and taking resources from his wife's I mean you could imagine that kind of social pressure he was under most people wouldn't even try to do that after one failure go back to the well again but he was someone who was willing to who wasn't sufficiently distressed by what I'm sure was the disapproval of his father-in-law and I didn't let that stop him from going ahead and trying again and that's that's what I'm talking with that element of toughness in the face of social criticism you also write that underdog strategies are hard or at least harder than giant strategies can you explain that a little bit yeah I mean that the choice you have as an underdog is if you're gonna choose to fight and choose to fight to win there are a series of strategies available to you but they are all more costly than the strategies available to the favorite so I give the example I have a chapter about a and a software mogul in Silicon Valley an Indian guy who coaches his daughters twelve-year-old daughters basketball team and they are without talent they are by his own by his own admission this was like their you know how to barely know how to play the game it takes them all the way to that national championships he does it by he instructs them they're gonna play the full-court press every minute of every game and defend every inch of the court right now that's actually a very effective strategy particularly in age class basketball if you're the underdog it's you earlier or in chance of winning is to play a really really aggressive defense it requires however that everyone in your team expend maximum effort every minute of the game you cannot loaf for an instant you have to be in really good shape and you have to run yourself ragged and you cannot let up most people will not that way because it's too difficult if I said to you we're not gonna be doing does this elegantly designed plays and shooting gorgeous baskets and passing the ball we're just going to be doing this for the entire game and you're going to be exhausted at the end most kids would say that that's not why I signed up so it's like that's a kind of classic illustration of that effort effort is the route one of the routes available to the underdog I can outwork you even if I may not be able to outspend you but I can outwork you well how working is a tall order is not easy to do you know that's as anyone who has worked in a startup knows that's the one of the stressful parts of it but successful startups I am I've never seen any actual data on this but do we think the people working for successful startups work longer hours than people who work for fortune 500 companies my guess is yes these lessons are so applicable to to business owners into entrepreneurs I wonder why didn't you look to include any of those examples in the book uh well I talked about I mean I talked about innovators and I talked I have moments when I talk about any of our comp broader I talk about this side but um I don't know I mean you choose whatever story is I could easily have I just got caught up in different things you know I don't think it matters you know the thing about particularly the business audience which has been an audience that I have my books have been well read in our world and I said no that part of my audience very well I don't think they in order to draw meaning from an example it doesn't have to be from their precise world I mean the thing about what's one of the one of the fascinating things that happened in the business world over the last 20 years is the increasing level of intellectual sophistication the willingness to look everywhere for ideas and for inspiration not just I mean these days if you meet a business executive they'll they'll know as much about social psychology is a social psychologist I mean they'll be reading books on neuroscience to get clues about how to talk to their customers I mean this is not true thirty years ago so I don't think people really matters I think people will take insight wherever it comes another big thing theme of the book is that there's such a thing as a desirable difficulty can you explain what that is and and why it can be advantageous yeah so this is this really interesting notion comes from these husband-and-wife psychology team at UCLA called the Bjork's and they started with learning look they were very interested in learning and you know the conventional notion with learning is to the extent that I make your task easier you will learn more if I allow you to read physics learn about physics in a book that is written beautifully and clearly you will learn physics better than if I give you a terribly written book translated from the German and they said well you know that's true but there are exceptions there are also cases where if I make the task slightly harder for you you'll learn better because if I make it a little bit harder maybe you'll be forced to concentrate more or maybe you will maybe you have to read it three times instead of once and in fact that's what I want you to do I want you to read it I want to force you to read it three times because you'll get it so I began to explore all these areas where you could distinguish desirable from undesirable difficulties was there a category of obstacles that had the net effect of making you further ahead and I love that idea that is a section of the book where I say look let's look at things that we conventionally understand as undesirable difficulties and see whether there are circumstances and for certain kinds of people for whom those kinds of difficulties are desirable so dyslexia would be a classic example I have a whole chapter in that book on dyslexic entrepreneurs oh this is an example of you writing another business relies forget within the book so there's this really interesting fact that a very large percentage a much larger percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic than in the general population and many of the Richard Branson Paul Orfila Charles Schwab John Chambers at Cisco I could go on Craig McCaw at a cellphone pioneer the lists of these guys are all dyslexic right David Neil minute JetBlue and if you talk to them they will explain to you that they don't think they succeeded in spite of their disability they think they do succeeded because of it for them and if you want and I sat down with a two dozen of these guys I've got I get so obsessed at the beginning of my book in the middle of my book was talking to dyslexic entrepreneurs and their stories are all the same they all look back and will tell you you know if it hadn't have been for the fact that I couldn't read or read well in second and third in fourth grade I would never have and they start listing all the things they were forced to do that proved to be ultimately advantageous I would never have learned how to listen I would never been forced in second weight I was I made friends with the smartest kid in the class and I basically convinced him to do my homework for me I can't tell you how many times I heard that so what are they learning at that age they're learning delegation they're learning how to communicate with other people motivate other people form a team I mean they and they do that in Brian Grazer the Hollywood producer who's dyslexic his whole thing was he would he figured out how he would fail his test so they would go in and he would talk is great up from a de to a C so from the age of this high he's learning negotiation right by the end but stopping hits college he's brilliant at it and then what did he do he becomes a Hollywood producer what is that about it's about negotiation among other things and he's been practicing his entire life so this a weird thing where he would say as difficult as my dyslexia was and for all of these people their childhoods were not fun I mean I interview Gary Cohn it was the president of Goldman who's her family dyslexic his childhood just sounds I mean dark and miserable no one thought he was capable of doing schoolwork I thought he was they were amazed with the googan graduated from high school despite that they all look back and say you know what it was a desirable difficulty it was I was taught I was forced to learn stuff I would never even have thought about so that's that I think that's a really beautiful idea definitely but you also mentioned there are a disproportionate number of dyslexic people in prisons so what's the perfect storm to make a difficulty desirable sick that's the that's the that's the million-dollar question I don't think anyone I don't think is any kind of simple answer and I think it depends on who you are and what your capabilities are and what the support system around you are is and how many other disadvantages you have I mean it's an but I that's the kind of conversation I want to start with this book so it's the classic parents conversation I would like my child to have as few as possible undesirable difficulties and as many as possible desirable difficulties but that's a very different kind of conversation then I think my job as a parent is to remove every obstacle from the path of my child which I think there are parents who do that thinking that's gonna put their child ahead and not realizing no in order to learn the things that really need to be learned we require a certain level of adversity the trick is figuring out what that adversity ought to look like right and that's like I said something that's that is a can only be decided on a case-by-case basis it's gonna be different for you than it is for me or for any of these you know for Gary Cohen get Goldman who probably has an IQ of 150 and who had a grandfather who totally believed in him and was the person he was closest in he's got two and it's pretty strong family around him it's a got three really big advantages right someone believes in a high level of native intelligence he can go through a lot of Hell at school and still come out okay but now imagine someone who didn't have a stratospheric IQ whose family wasn't supportive and who had other disadvantages had woke up every morning hungry now it's hard to see that their dyslexia would is easily be a desirable difficulty right that sounds to me like would be the straw that broke the camel's back if I might makes all kinds of metaphors but um so it depends you know instead of it it's a complicated question one sort of alarming theme of the book I think for a lot of business owners who are trying to grow their businesses is that once you reach a certain point of success or a certain point of wealth it actually can work against you and become a disadvantage can you explain that I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the inverted you the inverted u curve which is this idea that many of the phenomenon that we observe in the world there is not a constant relationship between inputs and outputs it doesn't the curve doesn't look like that the curve looks like that does that make sense that lots of things start out starts out that if you get bigger or rich or stronger things get better for you and then there's diminishing marginal returns where doesn't start to make much of a difference but there's clearly a point in many phenomenon where when you that over investment leads to negative returns so I use the example of class size when your class is very large and you make it smaller the kids are better off there is a period where the research is very strongly suggests that you can make classes if you make a class take a class from twenty to twenty five to twenty you think you're doing good you probably doing very little research suggests very that the kid is better off makes no difference but then you go below twenty to far below twenty and you can make a very strong argument that students are worse off so if you spend too much money on education you're not no longer making students creating an advantage for your students you're creating a disadvantage / - many resources have had the opposite of their intended effect and you know you could look at countless examples from the corporate world where his Microsoft a better company today this big then it wasn't it was this big I mean you can ask someone from Microsoft and they'll tell you that they were either when that they're too big now or I remember having a conversation with Bob Lutz at GM about was GM too big this was even after the bailout and he was like you know he doesn't it probably is too big I mean there there is clearly there are clearly advantages of scale but he said they kept out you need to be you need to make X number of cars a year in order to be an efficient producer but beyond that extra size just gets in your way now that was his that what GM the it the problems that suffered it with in terms of decision-making and innovation were that they were on the wrong side of this curve that all of that extra all those extra resources and strength and reach and scope and people we're getting in their way as opposed to enabling them to be to be effective so if you're a start-up the girls into a major into Google or if you're a David who goes into a Goliath do you necessarily lose some of that magic or is there something you can do to get it back not necessarily you it's never the case of you necessarily but the task of remaining as nimble and innovative as you once with were gets harder you know I think if you're if you're 20 people with a good idea the the job of remaining on your toes and focused is a no brainer your there's only 20 of you you don't have a choice right when you're 20,000 being nimble and on your toes is still possible it just requires really good leadership you know if you've got a very effective if you've got you know to go back to automobiles if you've got a limo hey okay I never to pronounce his name of the guy Ford well whatever will hey he says I forget we you know someone like a first class CEO who has managed to take a very very large organization and you know instill a sense of urgency of creativity of that's possible but you got to have a guy that good at the helm there aren't a lot of those people you know it just gets harder that's sort of the not impossible it's still possible for Microsoft to do something extraordinary just harder than when they were working out of a garage you also discuss a theory of remote missus which is that you know if you have come through some kind of adversity intact it can actually emboldened you oh can you talk about why you see that as an advantage for underdogs yeah so this is a an observation that comes from a famous book written about the London Blitz during the Second World War I got him JD mccurdy it's a psychiatrist he's trying to explain why didn't everyone panic when the Germans started bombing London the expectation was going into the war that when the Germans and everyone knew they were going to do it when they started bombing London everyone was gonna flee it's gonna be terrifying because they knew there was no way that British knew there was no way they could stop the Germans and they were planning actively for what they thought would be the end the end of the war which was that the population of London would in terror flee the city and the England would fall apart it never happened and so McCarty was trying to figure this out in fact by the end of by the end of the Blitz Londoners were indifferent in large part to it people weren't even going into their bomb shelters anymore they were just blowing it off and he comes up with this idea which says if the bomb hits next to you and you're buried under rubble and you crawl injured to your safety you're traumatized that's not a good thing if the bomb falls across the street and you're fine and then it falls across the street again and you're still fine you're emboldened you begin to feel invulnerable and because most people in London had the experience of a remoteness of the bomb falling across the street and only a very small number had a feeling of had an experience of the near miss when the bomb falls upon them the net effect of the bombing on London was to make Londoners indifferent more courageous they lost their fear because they were fine right who they thought like it's that feeling of you've been through the worst and you've survived and you're like oh now nothing could stop me now right I've so there's that that's what that phenomenon is what he was describing and I think that's a very good way of understanding why people were organisations can come through adversity not not always traumatized that there are a set of people there was there two very different responses people could have to true adversity one is to be crippled by it but the other is to emerge like nature said anything that does not kill me makes me stronger one is to emerge as Nietzsche and heroes right and that's you know that's a an unexpected upside to something terrible happening courage is always a good thing but can't that also lead to overconfidence just because you dodged the bomb the first time doesn't mean oh yeah we're the residents of London overconfident by the end of the war probably I would rather in wartime I'd rather my population be overconfident than under-confident or at least I would like them to be mildly overconfident there are you know there's a who's a wonderful literature on this that asks the question of whether entrepreneurs are as a group whether they are inherently overconfident you usefully deluded is the phrase the people they're not excessively so but to start a business under the assumption that you will succeed requires overconfidence because the numbers say you won't succeed right so it's very useful kind of delusion that have you also write about the value of being a big fish in a little pond which I think a lot of startups use to you know hire the best talent why is that so I've been Teja s-- because it's a long argument but I've I think an important one because the short answer is that little ponds can give their give their fish more freedom when you are our sense of our own self-worth and our own self-confidence is to ride from judgments about our peer group so when when you ask the question how good a journalist you are or how good a writer you are you don't compare yourself to all the writers in the world if you did - err I'm sorry - err for all the people in the world if you did that you're clearly in the 99.9% Isle you're a professional writer you're gonna be better than almost everybody you compare yourself to your immediate peer group to the people you know who are writers to you and then you and that's a very different huge a very different kind of judgment we do that as human beings we form our self perceptions based on our immediate surroundings so if you put someone in a very very highly competitive pond they are going to reach very different conclusions about who they are and what they're capable of then if you put them in a less selective pond a smaller pond and if you are someone who is just starting out or as innov on who appeared in your life that could be really crucial it can be quite dangerous and damaging to be in a situation where you compare yourself only to the very very best to the best you can wrongly think that you're dumb and I talked about the consequence of that in terms of math and science education that we see huge amounts of dropouts in math and science education at the post-secondary level and it's always the kids in the bottom of the class your your likelihood of dropping out from science and math is not a function of your intelligence it's a function of the intelligence of those around you it's really interesting I always think of a friend of mine who I knew in college who was brilliant but she went to their most elite academically elite high school in Toronto where everyone had an IQ 150 finish her IQ was maybe 145 she thought she was a mediocre student I mean only if you went to the most select high school in all of Canada would you conclude that but she she did she had the misfortune to being a small fish in an exceedingly large and competitive pond and if she got in my high school she would have thought she was Albert Einstein so I wonder for all the the successful David's that you found in your research were there instances of people who you felt like had great opportunity and maybe missed that chance well I mean there's multiple examples of people who turn their backs on their opportunities I don't I mean I suppose I talk about the the thing that the topic the theme that I spent a lot of time his book is looking at that in the context of goliaths of people who what are the kinds of mistakes that are specific to those who have every obvious material advantage and that's really interesting because goliaths are always often those are often blowing it misperceiving their own strengths or overestimating their own strengths and under estimating the particular kinds of vulnerabilities that come from being big so I have a chapter on the British in Northern Ireland how the British Army handled the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants in the 1970s and there the British made a series of quite serious errors that had to do very much with their power they were so overwhelmingly in the powerful most powerful position relative to their the other combatants that they I think were blind to the way in which they were perceived they didn't realize they were never forced to look at things through the eyes of particularly the Catholics in Northern Ireland that's a very common kind of empathy failure is very common along the powerful and also do you feel that a lot of times goliaths are tripped up by not paying attention to the David not not seeing them in the wings even though the David's are watching their every move ya know I think there is that asymmetry that those in positions of power don't realize they need to pay attention to those who are weaker than them and that is a cause of multiple heartbreak down the line for a god for the Goliath of the world you also were related to that you wrote about the fact that a lot of underdogs come in and do things differently because they don't really know how they should be done because they're newcomers can you give me an example of how you saw that happen in your recent yeah well it's kind of I mean that's the theme of the original story of David angle of Dave and Goliath is that David who is an outsider he's not a soldier and there's a convention among soldiers in that time in ancient times that you would resolve a battle between two armies by having two soldiers have a sword fight and David is either oblivious or indifferent to this he's a shepherd he's got nothing at stake he's no reason to go along with conventions of warfare and so he brings this different weapon superior technology there's a fight and uses it without suffering any kind of anxiety or neurosis or second thoughts and that's a kind of beautiful example of how disruptive how satyrs can be by virtue of being or a similar case study is the is a more erect the oncologists are right about him cured childhood leukemia who is someone who again was just outside of was so came from a kind of social and economic class so different from his peers that he had none of the constraints that they had he was willing to do outrageous things and to piss all kinds of people off and to do all kinds of things that would have been unthinkable had he had something at stake in the world but he had nothing he was like a poor kid from the ghetto so it was like whatever you know and those are very that kind of the freedom that comes from being on the outside his can be really quite extraordinary do you see any links between David and Goliath and the Talent myth and your theories about you know who tends to rise to the top and yeah cooperation yeah I guess I mean my problem with the Talmud was always that it was how people were defining the notion that the way to build a successful business is simply to hire the most cognitively advanced people you can find struck me is wrong for many many different reasons but part of it is that it's an incredibly narrow definition of what you think is advantageous in your workforce and that's sort of what I'm trying to get it at the book is to expand our definition of advantage they were saying I'm basically I'm interested in someone's IQ know I keep steadily important I'm not saying it's not important but there was such a narrow focus on someone's on that particular set of capabilities that it excluded all kinds of other stuff that's I would have thought you know the biggest advantage Sam Walton had when he starts Walmart is the fact that he had failed before and he learned all kinds of stuff from his previous failure you know you could argue I'm actually interested what if you said I'm interested people who failed just because I think that they would have learned lessons that no one else had a chance to learn yet that's something that's a reasonable case you could make for that kind of criterion but when you when you're interested in talent that's not part of the definition of towns in fact talent that's almost the Angi definition of right we used failures to exclude people if we're picking just on the basis of talent where I say I actually you could make an argument that value ought to be something that includes you in the pool of potential talent some people say that you know the examples in the book are ones that specifically back up the thesis of the book what do you say to that well I think everyone anyone who's ever made an argument in since arguments began has chosen evidence to support their arguments so I would hope I did that if I chose evidence that didn't support my arguments I'd be writing a very funny kind of book wouldn't it so yeah I don't I mean that's just a people that's a it's a fancy way of saying that they disagree with things in the book which is fine why would you say the entrepreneur should read this book because this book is fundamentally about the weapons of the spirit use this lovely phrase but ultimately it's about how the things that are in your heart or your soul or your imagination are every bit of every bit the equal of the things of the material advantages that you've been given and for anyone starting a business businesses are about the weapons of the startups are about the weapons of the spirit right you don't typically unless you're some kind of special case you don't have material advantages what you have are your ideas your motivation your perseverance your excitement your faith your and this book is an attempt to appreciate those gifts for what they are and I think that's something that everyone launched Barrett would be interested in what surprised you most when you're already in the book I don't know so many things I had so much fun doing this doing this book maybe the dyslexia staff really fascinated me I've never really got that in my head this that so many successful entrepreneurs have what we would consider in society to be a disability so that raises the question of why do we call it a disability or at least why is our definition of of what something like this Lexia means is so narrow it's very narrow and unsatisfying it doesn't capture the range of ways in which people can respond to a given set of obstacles what other desirable difficulties did you find that certain groups shared were there others in addition to dyslexia yeah I mean I have a chapter about parental loss which is really weird and interesting about how many just looking at two groups American presidents and British Prime Minister's how many of them suffered the loss of a parent during childhood and the answer is a hugely disproportionate number way more than in general population you know Obama I mean list is actually quite astonishingly long for not for everyone by any stretch of imagination for those people for the small subset of very successful people you can make an argument that that difficulty of losing a parent was in the end desirable not in the moment it caused enormous pain in the moment but maybe growing up under those kinds of conditions where they were and there's a huge body of psychoanalytic literature to support this notion where they were forced to assume certain roles prematurely to displace the father in their family unit maybe undergoing that kind of experience at a young age if you are someone possessed of other gifts accelerates your progress and toughen you for certain kinds of experiences in the future and we talked about you know some of the companies that got too big Microsoft hewlett-packard have you seen any recent examples of companies that have come into too you know unseen major corporations yeah well I don't feel like that's the isn't that this that's the perennial story of the marketplace is this ceaseless churn where the mighty fall and it doesn't happen all the time to everyone but um you know there's that Greg Zuckerman has written this book about fracking and one of the things he points out is that the the the group of people who explored and exploited all of these new reserves of shale gas in the United States have pioneered this new extension of the industry we're all Outsiders it wasn't the big players it was these upstarts who came along and tried something that had been dismissed as too difficult or not worth it by the seamy and the major oil and gas players are some of the biggest companies in the world right and they missed this opportunities in the beginning it was so that's a beautiful contemporary David and Goliath story right there you

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Keywords: Inc. (Magazine), Inc.com, Small Business, Entrepreneurship, Business, News, Entrepreneur (Profession), Startup, Leadership, David and Goliath: Underdogs, New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, Issie Lapowsky, Gladwell, New Yorker writer, ounder, co-founder, founders, company, companies, business advice, work, work ethic, business tips, start ups, growing companies, CEO, CFO, business lessons, business insight

Id: jqx37yjCaJs

Length: 42min 35sec (2555 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2018