Take off with limited capital to control the venture. These strategies helped Bezos stayed in control of the company. After take-off, VCs wanted to fund him and he could pick anyone he wanted. Bezos also received a small amount of venture capital from a Seattle VC firm and, after take-off, from Kleiner Perkins in Silicon Valley. He is said to have warned his investors that they had a 30% chance of success and gave them about 20% of the company. Bezos was financed by his parents and got about $1,000,000 from about 20 angels. They kept control of their venture and of the wealth they created. 94% of unicorn-entrepreneurs avoided or delayed VC to grow with control. Amazingly, he sold cloud services to Target, one of his competitors.Įarly VC is controlling VC. And then he built a platform with other products and other merchants, and his cloud computing service, AWS, to solidify his control of the Internet. Amazon developed its platform with other products, other sellers, and AWS. Just as Apple and Microsoft and Walmart have used their platforms to sell a variety of products and services and avoid becoming obsolete, did the same. Seek a platform for long-term potential.Īfter getting a foothold on the emerging trend, unicorn-entrepreneurs then build a platform to consolidate their dominance of the emerging trend. But his strategic innovation was that he sold it on the Internet as it was emerging to get an edge over the much larger store-based booksellers like Borders and Barnes & Noble. He sold books-not exactly an innovative product. Unicorn-entrepreneurs who dominate usually imitate the product, or use a product that can be easily imitated, and improve the strategy to dominate the fulcrum of the emerging trend. The reality is that 89% of first movers fail to dominate. The common myth is that successful entrepreneurs are first movers. Focus on strategic innovation, not product innovation.

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