The Unfair Advantage

Have you ever looked at a wildly successful entrepreneur and wondered, “What do they have that I don’t?” In The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed, founders Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba set out to answer that exact question. Their core argument flips the usual narrative of startup success on its head: it’s not a level playing field, and success isn’t solely the product of hard work or intelligence. Instead, it’s built on a constellation of circumstances, traits, and opportunities—what they call your Unfair Advantages.

Ali and Kubba argue that by identifying and leveraging these unique advantages—rather than chasing someone else’s blueprint—you can work smarter, not harder. The world may be unfair, but that unfairness can be used in your favor once you see clearly where your strengths lie.

The Myth of Meritocracy

Much of business literature celebrates a “hustle” culture, built around the seductive idea that endless hard work guarantees success. Ali and Kubba call this story a seductive lie. Life isn’t meritocratic; success depends not only on drive but on external factors such as wealth, connections, education, and timing. They use Evan Spiegel’s story—the privileged founder of Snapchat—as an emblem of this imbalance. Spiegel didn’t just have talent and ambition; he had wealthy parents, elite schooling, and mentorship from world-class business leaders. His success was built upon a mountain of existing advantages.

Rather than lamenting this inequality, the authors propose a new lens: accept the unfairness of life, identify what hand you were dealt, and play it wisely. Knowing that luck and privilege exist can give you peace and clarity instead of resentment or victimhood.

The Dual Engines of Success: Hard Work and Luck

Ali and Kubba insist that financial and entrepreneurial success is massively both—luck and hard work. They echo LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who said his own achievements stem “massively from both.” The book analyzes stories like Oprah Winfrey’s—a woman whose improbable rise intertwined trauma, talent, and timing—and Warren Buffett’s, whose “ovarian lottery” of being born in mid-20th-century America gave him opportunities unavailable to most. Such examples illustrate the reality-growth mindset that the authors advocate: a practical blend of belief in personal agency and acceptance of randomness.

This balanced philosophy protects you from burnout and bitterness. If you lean too far into “it’s all luck,” you become passive. If you believe “it’s all you,” disillusionment awaits when effort doesn’t yield quick reward. Reality lies between: work relentlessly, but acknowledge forces beyond your control.

The MILES Framework

The authors translate their theory into a practical tool—the MILES Framework—a system for assessing your assets and advantages. Each letter stands for one critical factor of success:

• Money – the capital you possess or can raise.
• Intelligence & Insight – the way you see patterns, connect ideas, and learn.
• Location & Luck – being in the right place at the right time and knowing how to increase serendipity.
• Education & Expertise – what you know and the skills you’ve developed through both formal learning and self-teaching.
• Status – your network, reputation, and self-confidence.

At the foundation of MILES lies Mindset. It’s the one advantage everyone can cultivate, regardless of where they start. The authors stress that growth, perseverance, and vision determine how far your other advantages can take you. As they write, mindset is the fertile soil from which every other advantage grows.

Turning Disadvantages into Advantages

A defining insight of the book is that even seeming disadvantages can morph into power. Sara Blakely’s story—with her failed law career and years of rejection selling fax machines—proves that resilience and outsider perspective can drive innovation. Her frustration with traditional hosiery led to Spanx, the billion-dollar shapewear brand. Similarly, Tristan Walker turned his experience as a young Black man struggling with razor burn into a thriving company, Walker & Co. In both cases, hardship bred insight. You don’t need every advantage; you just need the right ones and the awareness to use them fully.

Why It Matters

Understanding unfair advantages reshapes how you define success. It eliminates guilt and envy—two emotions that poison motivation—and replaces them with clarity. You stop trying to become the next Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg and start building on your unique foundation. Whether your assets are cultural awareness, social empathy, or technical expertise, knowing your MILES allows you to grow deliberately instead of blindly hustling.

Ultimately, The Unfair Advantage helps you redefine what winning means. It’s not about competing on equal terms—it’s about identifying and amplifying what’s already in your corner. Life might be unfair, but if you learn to work the system rather than fight it, you really do have what it takes to succeed.

Ali and Kubba open their MILES model with a vital premise: everything begins with mindset. Without the right mental framework, even money, skill, and connections won’t carry you far. They distinguish between three main mindsets—Fixed, Growth, and their own synthesis called the Reality-Growth Mindset.

Fixed vs. Growth: Beyond Carol Dweck’s Model

Borrowing from psychologist Carol Dweck’s renowned research, the authors describe how people with a fixed mindset believe talents are innate. When they fail, they crumble or blame others. Those with a growth mindset see abilities as malleable—they say, “I can’t code… yet.” This small word, “yet,” opens a universe of possibility.

But Ali and Kubba see a flaw in Dweck’s model: it ignores the hard boundaries of reality. Not everyone can become a Nobel laureate or billionaire. Believing you can achieve anything risks delusion. Their proposed middle ground—the Reality-Growth Mindset—balances ambition with realism. You accept limits while believing your boundaries are flexible.

Feet on the Ground, Head in the Clouds

To visualize this balance, the authors use the metaphor “feet rooted on the ground, head in the clouds.” Self-awareness keeps you grounded, self-belief keeps you inspired. Realistic optimism motivates you to act while protecting you from bitterness when the world doesn’t comply. Like the duality of luck and hard work, mindset demands paradox: humility and ambition coexisting in one brain.

Four Pillars of Strong Mindset

• Vision – seeing clearly what you’re building and why. Oprah’s childhood vision of a better life exemplifies this power.
• Resourcefulness – jumping off the cliff and building the airplane on the way down, as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman quipped.
• Constant Growth – continuous learning amid a changing world where degrees are no longer the ultimate credential.
• Grit – the stamina to endure uncertainty and rejection, especially in startups.

Together these create the fertile soil from which every other unfair advantage can flourish. Without mindset, you risk being the privileged person who “has everything but does nothing.” With it, even scarcity becomes a spark for creativity.

Money, the first pillar of MILES, often sets the tone for unequal opportunity. Ali and Kubba reveal how wealth can accelerate progress but also distort it. Having money means having a longer runway—the time before your startup collapses under expenses. Yet its absence can ignite hunger and innovation that abundance often erodes.

Money as an Unfair Advantage

The authors dissect entrepreneurial stories powered by capital—from Euan Blair’s WhiteHat, sustained by a half-million-pound parental “capital contribution,” to Jeff Bezos’s family investment in Amazon. Access to wealth buys learning time, experimentation, and a safety net. Rich founders can afford failure; poor founders cannot.

Runway and Burn Rate

Startups live and die by numbers: runway (time before funds run out) and burn rate (money spent monthly). Managing these metrics means survival. Founders can extend runway by lowering costs—living lean, cutting unnecessary luxury—and raising money gradually through savings, freelancing, or small investors. Strategic frugality, the authors note, stretches creativity in ways endless funding can’t.

The Double-Edged Sword

Money isn’t purely good or bad. Abundance breeds complacency; scarcity breeds invention. Ash Ali’s journey from working-class Birmingham fueled his ambition—he literally had nothing to lose. Hasan Kubba’s modest savings let him buy an online course and bootstrap his first business from home. Meanwhile, wealthy founders often throw money at problems instead of solving them creatively, weakening their adaptability.

In the long run, necessity—the mother of invention—may outweigh privilege. Having less forces you to focus on fast profitability and customer value.

Smart doesn’t always mean academically gifted. Intelligence in Ali and Kubba’s framework spans multiple dimensions: analytical IQ, social and emotional understanding, street smarts, and creative cognition. Insight, its companion, transforms intelligence into application—spotting gaps and seeing what others miss.

Four Types of Intelligence

• IQ and Book Smarts – The ability to grasp theory. Patrick and John Collison of Stripe combined elite education with relentless curiosity to code before adulthood.
• Street Smarts – Emotional and social intuition. Founders who read people well attract investors and teammates. Nikola Tesla’s lack of this skill left him brilliant but broke.
• Creative Intelligence – Connecting ideas across domains. Steve Jobs’s calligraphy class inspired Apple’s hallmark design aesthetic.
• Insight – Translating intelligence into action—seeing needs hidden in plain sight.

Insight in Action

Insight is entrepreneurship’s holy grail. Tristan Walker solved a pain unique to his experience—razor burn among Black men—creating a multimillion-dollar brand. Will Shu founded Deliveroo after personally cycling as a courier, gathering firsthand insight on logistics.

How to Cultivate Insight

Be curious, ask questions, and seek pain points. Work in an industry before disrupting it. Your insight arises where empathy meets experience. Intelligence provides tools; insight reveals where to use them. Together, they’re your compass for innovation.

Half of success, the old saying goes, is just showing up. Ali and Kubba extend this idea: success also means showing up in the right place at the right time. Location and Luck are unfair advantages that multiply opportunity through proximity—physical, social, and mental.

Location as Leverage

Silicon Valley exemplifies how geography creates billionaires. A perfect storm of research universities, funding, and informal knowledge-sharing made it a magnet for tech. Similar clusters—London’s Silicon Roundabout, Beijing’s startup hubs—show that innovation thrives where talent gathers. Ash’s move from Birmingham to London transformed his prospects; Hasan’s parents moving from war-torn Baghdad to England changed his fate entirely.

Luck: Making the Dice Roll Your Way

Luck isn’t mystical—it’s measurable. Psychologist Richard Wiseman’s research found “lucky people” simply notice opportunities more. They act, talk to strangers, follow intuition, and convert misfortune into learning. The authors echo this: increase your luck by increasing your exposure—meet more people, attend more events, publish more work.

Double-Edged Advantage

Prestigious locations like Silicon Valley grant access—but also high living costs and fierce competition. Remote founders, like those behind Basecamp, turned isolation into strength by pioneering calm, distributed culture. The lesson: you can make Location and Luck work anywhere if you optimize your environment for learning and chance encounters—online or off.

Education and Expertise are the knowledge bases of unfair advantage. While degrees traditionally signal competence, Ali and Kubba argue that learning-by-doing now rivals institutional education. The unfairness lies in access—but self-teaching can close the gap.

Formal vs. Informal Advantage

Elite education offers three gifts: knowledge, network, and signaling. Stanford grads like Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned academic dissertation work into Google. Their access to mentors and peers made insight actionable. Similar ecosystems form around MIT or Harvard—schools that mint unicorns.

Expertise by Practice

Yet Ash Ali’s story proves university isn’t essential. He learned coding from books at Staple’s aisles and built eCommerce websites before degrees mattered. Hasan’s expertise grew from taking an online business course. They both underscore a modern truth: you can be “YouTube certified” and still thrive.

Expertise comes from iteration, feedback, and shared learning. Mentors accelerate this process; teaching others deepens it. Choose one domain, master it deeply, then connect it to others. In a world of constant disruption, lifelong learning—formal or self-directed—is one of your strongest unfair advantages.

Status measures how others perceive your value—and how you perceive your own. It includes your outward symbols (network, credentials) and inner foundation (confidence and self-esteem). Society often mistakes status for merit, rewarding signs of success over substance.

Outer Status and Social Capital

Your social standing affects opportunity. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu divided capital into economic (money), cultural (class signals, accent, style), and social (connections). Successful startup founders leverage all three. Being an “ex-Googler” or “Harvard dropout” raises credibility instantly.

The authors show how Sara Blakely and Tristan Walker turned outsider status—female founder, African American entrepreneur—into insight-driven advantage. By solving problems neglected by mainstream players, they rewrote what prestige looked like in their industries.

Inner Status and Imposter Syndrome

Inner status—the way you feel about yourself—fuels outer perception. High self-esteem radiates confidence; low self-regard repels opportunity. Imposter syndrome—the feeling of not deserving success—haunts even seasoned founders. The cure? Recognize that everyone feels inadequate sometimes. Focus on small wins and self-compassion.

Kylie Jenner’s path contrasts privilege with savvy brand leverage. Her family fame (“outer status”) gave her marketing reach, but her confidence to launch Kylie Cosmetics was equally vital. Status, wielded consciously, becomes strategy rather than vanity.

Every entrepreneurial journey needs a compass. For Ali and Kubba, that compass is your Why—the deeper motivation driving you. Without it, success feels hollow, or misdirected toward society’s illusions of prestige. Chapters 12 and 13 pivot from philosophy to practicality: aligning motivation with company type.

Define Success for Yourself

Your “Why” might come from pain or desire. Ash sought freedom from his parents’ limited lifestyle; Hasan wanted independence and purposeful work. Whatever your goal—financial comfort, recognition, impact—it must satisfy both your lower self (ego, desire for comfort) and higher self (purpose, contribution). Motivation without meaning leads to burnout; status-driven ambition leads to emptiness.

Lifestyle vs. Hyper-Growth Startups

Once you know your motivations, choose your vehicle. Lifestyle startups prioritize sustainable income and balance—small consultancies, eCommerce, content creation. Hyper-growth startups chase scale, investor capital, and billion-dollar valuations—think Uber, Airbnb, or Just Eat. The choice depends on your unfair advantages. If you lack massive funding or networks, start with lifestyle business, build expertise and profit, then expand.

Either way, aligning your Why with the right type saves years of frustration. You’re not choosing between ambition and sanity—you’re choosing the combination that fits what success means to you.

Ideas are cheap; execution is rare. In their startup quick-start guide, Ali and Kubba steer readers from inspiration to implementation through principles like validation, MVP creation, and growth scrapping.

Validating the Idea

Don’t fall in love with your brainstorm—test it. Talk to customers, get pre-orders, run small experiments. WhatsApp and Instagram succeeded by pivoting after listening to users. Validation protects you from building products nobody wants.

Minimum Viable Product

Perfection kills startups; speed saves them. Build something simple and “crappy but working” to gauge reactions. Co-founder Reid Hoffman said, “If you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you launched too late.” Real feedback matters more than perfect design.

Growth Scrapping Before Growth Hacking

Before automated marketing, founders must hustle manually—meeting customers one by one. This “growth scrapping” precedes scalable growth. Ali’s hand-built relationships at Just Eat exemplify it. Later, creative experimentation—growth hacking—multiplies results, but it begins with personal grit and genuine value.

Execution Over Ideas

Almost no startup succeeded because of a unique idea; most thrived through better execution, timing, and user insight. (Note: Bill Gross’s research at Idealab found timing was the #1 predictor of startup success.) Don’t chase novelty—chase resonance.

When your startup reaches traction, raising funds can amplify growth—but it also adds pressure. Ali and Kubba’s final section outlines how to approach investors wisely, using clarity, brevity, and authenticity.

The Levels of Funding

From savings and bootstrapping to angel investors, venture capital, and IPOs, the authors chart the hierarchy of financing. Skills, traction, and credibility determine how far you can climb. Early rounds rely on relationships—the famous “Three Fs” of startup capital: Family, Friends, and Fools.

How to Pitch

• Be concise—no jargon, no hype.
• Answer ten essentials: What you do, the problem you solve, your traction, market size, team, competition, unfair advantage, funding need, and spending plan.
• Tell a story—use emotion and specificity.

The best founders attract investors not by begging for money but by presenting irresistible clarity. Emphasize your insight and trajectory rather than your dreams of fame. Investors fund momentum, not potential.

Case Study: Canva

Melanie Perkins’s persistence in building Canva shows how unfair advantages stack: supportive family, insight from teaching design, grit through rejection, and timing in the rise of collaborative tools. After dozens of failed pitches, she raised $3 million and built a billion-dollar company. Perkins proves that awareness, action, and adaptability—not perfection—turn unfairness into strength.