Hungry Dogs

It’s February 2018 in Philadelphia. The Eagles, Philly’s football team, have just won the Super Bowl, their first NFL title since 1960.

The crowd outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art is in full swing. Jason Kelce, Eagles Centre, takes the stage.

It’s a celebration speech like no other.

Kelce highlights the meanest barbs every team member’s received over the season (often in brutal detail, and proudly embraces the team’s underdog status, screaming, in conclusion, that: “an underdog is a hungry dog, and hungry dogs run faster.”

The underdog concept is something athletes and sports teams obsess over, going to heroic lengths to position themselves as doubted, insulted, or written off, regardless of their success.

The recent documentary about Steph Curry, now easily one of the best basketball players of all time, is simply called Underrated.

IIt begins with three minutes of someone reading out a draft report outlining - in excruciating detail - how small and uncompetitive he is.

Or take The Last Dance, where Michael Jordan details how he would take the tiniest perceived slight - one example involves a rival player telling him only that he had a “good game” in the corridor - and use that as the motivation to succeed.

You can understand why they do it: there’s nothing quite as motivating to do something, as someone telling you you can’t.

Plus, thought we all wish that we could constantly be driven by the love of the game, the day-to-day of working on something that matters means we often need some other, slightly less virtuous, form of motivation, to keep us going.

An underdog mentality not only keeps you going, but makes you - and your team - much easier to root for, especially when positioned against an overwhelming favourite.

It’s no surprise then, that companies too, have over the years, taken on the mantle of underdogs. Founding tales of garages and bedroom. Apple’s 1984 advert. Canva’s 100 investor rejections.

Plucky upstarts, sticking it to the man. And winning.

But in the last few years it’s stopped.

The goal is instead to position yourself as the overdog: with the best product, the most capital, the company that is overwhelmingly likely to dominate the category.

Why is that? I think for a few reasons. 

First, I think most of us now have it pretty heavily drilled into our heads that social proof is key to getting anything off the ground.

It is, but you can slightly misinterpret it sometimes.

Social proof doesn’t mean imitating a big, established incumbent, it simply means being able to tell a credible story about how people love your products. No more than that.

Second, if you’re reliant on raising institutional capital, then you need to be able to tell a convincing story about how you are the winner in whatever category you’re playing in.

Unlike sports, where the stopwatch never lies, when it comes to money, narrative matters.

And in that world, it's the overdog that attracts the capital.

So it's understandable that the instinct to project size and success bleeds into the product itself, making founders tread with caution in positioning their company as part of an underdog story.

The best, however, can do both.

Take Airbnb: one of - I think - only three venture-funded startups founded after 2008 to have actually made it to the S&P 500 (Moderna and Uber are the other two that come to mind).

The founding story of that company - told time and time again - is one of the underdog.

Storing maxed out credit cards in a trading card folder. Having to sell cereal to survive. Rejection emails that Brian Chesky reads aloud on podcasts.

It’s a compelling narrative - and is compelling from day one. You don’t need to have made it first.

And if you can embrace it early, once it’s in your DNA, it never leaves.

Indeed, last week - six years after that speech in Philadelphia - Jason Kelce retired.

At the end of the forty minute press conference, he returned back to the core theme of his life, and his playing career:

“I have been the underdog my entire career, and I mean this when I say it, I wish I still was.”

aled@ashore.io