Entrepreneurship and Life Lessons

Polymath Entrepreneur Builds Unicorn Business in 3 Years Using Combinatorial Innovation

Here’s how Hector transformed his startup into a billion-dollar company using his beyond-box thinking and a six-step diligent approach

Purpose of the Story

This story introduces critical points from a successful entrepreneur’s personal and professional life. The key points are leveraging his polymath and combinatorial innovation capabilities to scale up his startup business rapidly with mass collaboration and create a billion-dollar company.

A Brief Background to Hector’s Personal and Professional Life

Born in a low-income family, Hector struggled with his physical and mental health for many years. As a result, he had a painful childhood and adolescence, making him a resilient and appreciative person.

However, his inquisitive mind and a strong appetite for knowledge brought serendipitous encounters to his life. His parents did not have enough money to support him, but they gave him an abundance of love, optimism, and hope that nurtured his mind.

He mentioned the prayers of his mum every night, telling him God would give him what he deserves one day and blessed him before going to bed. After his mum’s blessing, Hector had many lucid dreams talking to angels giving him information from the beyond not documented in books.

Hector was not a traditionally religious person. He respected all religions. However, he had a strong sense of spirituality, taking him beyond his identity and connecting with others meaningfully.

He nurtured this gift to accumulate knowledge, become a polymath, see the needed truth, and create his own reality.

His optimism, diligence, integrity, and persistence empowered him to solve his health issues and transform his body. He became a sensible biohacker healing his body and mind with experimentations empowered with his esoteric knowledge.

He was open to all possibilities. He never judged anything reactively but accepted whatever came to his psyche and physical world.

He formally studied technology, engineering, and science with multiple scholarships. Besides, he informally learned about philosophy, psychology, leadership, entrepreneurship, medicine, and holistic health, making him a polymath. He learned to combine these disciplines for his business.

When Hector experimentally gained an abundance of physical and mental energy, his creativity and productivity skyrocketed. Ginnie was out of the bottle asking him three wishes. He made the correct ones that gave him what he needed in life.

Hector leveraged combinatorial innovation.

Hector’s metaphorical Ginnie introduced him to combinatorial innovation as one of his wishes. Ginnie told him that he needed to combine various innovative ideas structurally to create new meanings for his prospective clients.

Rather than focusing on creating new technology and products, Hector paid attention to the functions of his innovations and proven ideas in the industry. He then extended the meanings of multiple functions by combining them innovatively.

Ginnie told him there was nothing new under the sun. Only the way combining them make those things unique. He remembered his lucid dreams in his childhood when inventors whispered many unique ideas to his psyche.

He became a polymath and used it to enhance combinatorial innovation.

I met Hector years ago when I was conducting leadership research investigating the cognitive patterns of exceptional and distinguished leaders. I changed his name to comply with the ethical requirements of my dissertation and related publications in various settings.

Since his childhood, Hector has been interested in many subjects. Biology, physics, and chemistry broadened his horizon. Technology and engineering empowered his ideas to turn into tangible outcomes.

Philosophy and psychology helped him to connect with others meaningfully. His emotional intelligence and mastery significantly increased when he learned and practiced empathy and compassion.

His emotional maturity made him a leader in multiple fields. His leadership skills significantly improved as he consistently walked his talk with diligence, integrity, and prudence.

People around him got attracted to his ideas. Everyone felt safe and secure around him. Trust opened many doors in his exciting journey.

What is a unicorn business?

A unicorn business is a startup company that is valued at more than a billion dollars. A unicorn is a mythical animal representing the rarity of success for modest beginners.

Hector started his company with around $100 thousand government funds for startups. However, his mass collaboration and smart investments multiplied the income exponentially.

I also introduced another friend who created a unicorn business despite her setbacks in an article titled Here’s How a Single-Mum Reversed Her Obesity and Built up a Unicorn Business.

Without going into details, I’d like to provide the key points that helped Hector create a unicorn business in three years.

I only focus on the essential points at a high level to keep this piece practical with takeaways.

1 — Created a compelling prototype.

Being an inventor of multiple filed patents, Hector combined them to create a new product with multiple functionalities.

He drafted the necessary algorithms in his back office and integrated them to create numerous functions and use cases.

When he had a clear idea, without revealing his integrated data structures and algorithms, Hectors approached his previous colleagues, family members, and friends, asking them hypothetical questions.

After collecting considerable data, he created patterns and verified them in public forms, such as during his volunteer presentations to community members.

Using his Design Thinking skills, leveraging prospective clients’ requirements and use cases, Hector created a compelling prototype. It was a mini version of his grand innovation.

2 — Created a high-performance dream team.

Hiring many people with around $100K was not feasible. So he decided to hire a few contractors specializing in certain areas to contribute to developing his product.

After building a great relationship with some of them, Hector offered them a partnership based on their contribution levels. These contractors with ownership performed well. They established his dream team.

With generated income from initial sales, Hector hired talented employees and gave them some shares of his company. As a result, due to his integrity and compassion for others, his employees remained loyal to him.

3 — Hired an executive coach and had several mentors.

Hector found himself in the middle of a pleasant dream. He kept asking whether it was real or a dream since his income from the recently launched product was incredible.

He never imagined this much money to manifest in his life. They couldn't believe it when he confidentially shared the figures with his parents. His mum kept praying for his health and well-being.

Hector did not share the income details with anyone else except for his parents. He did not waste his income either. He invested wisely.

Managing this success looked overwhelming to Hector. One of his trusted friends recommended he hire an experienced executive coach to support him. This coach transitioned many entrepreneurs from low-income to very high income focusing on the psychological aspect of success.

During this growth period, while mentoring many proteges, Hector also got several mentors to give him unique perspectives.

He chose his mentors from different domains, age groups, and genders. Consequently, he mastered the psychology of entrepreneurship.

4 — Combined his intellectual properties for integrated solutions.

This was the heart of Hector’s business. Initially, he started with a few functions creating a limited solution for his selected clients.

His next attempt was to combine multiple intellectual properties and combining them with the inventions of other successful people in his dream team.

With the effective use of combinatorial innovation, entrepreneurship, and industry leadership principles, his introductory product became more compelling for his clients.

Then the company proliferated. His success coach and mentors monitored and energized him in this exciting journey.

5 — Created a mass collaboration platform.

From the beginning, Hector has been big on collaboration. His collaborative efforts on small scales brought many benefits.

His trusted advisors encouraged him to focus on mass collaboration to scale up the business. Since Hector had robust technology and engineering background, he quickly built a platform to allow mass collaboration.

In a short time, contributors to his product development significantly increased. Many were budding researchers, doctorate, master’s, and honors students from academic environments who wanted to share their ongoing research relevant to Hector’s business.

Each contributor brought new ideas empowering his promising product lines. His digital intelligence skills and other powerful skills helped him understand the virtual team dynamics and grow it incrementally.

6 — He scaled up his business incrementally.

The incremental growth of collaboration also gradually contributed to the company’s business growth.

Since Hector served as an agile champion and Design Thinking practitioner in his previous jobs, he applied these principles for the incremental growth of his startup.

He hired hands-on agile and Design Thinking practitioners to manage the product lines using agility principles. These talented employees worked and led with agility while keeping the focus on quality.

They developed prototypes with minimal budget focusing on the minimal viable products. Rather than cumbersome documents, they created user stories and epics with acceptance and performance criteria.

Effective use of agile principles helped Hector to grow his business incrementally but rapidly by failing fast and cheaply. They used the minor failures as lessons, empowering their business further.

Key Leadership Characteristics of Hector

Hector depicted all characteristics of excellent technical leaders when he started his business. When he created a unicorn business, he portrayed many characteristics of distinguished leaders that I documented in my previous articles.

Here are the key traits that enabled Hector to create a unicorn business in three years.

1 — Extensive knowledge and unique expertise make him a polymath

2 — Working and creating his solutions in a flow state

3 — Learning from mistakes and delivering solutions rapidly

4 — Articulating issues and requirements with precision

5 — Embracing change with agility and optimism

6 — Recognizing the greatness of others and empowering them with compassion

7 — Seeing the invisible and making them tangible for others

8 — Measuring with diligence

9 — Influencing others by bridging gaps

10 — Transforming his goals and outcomes with passion

Conclusions and Takeaways

I studied the lives of many successful people like Hector and learned much from their distinguishing traits. I documented some of them and compiled them into a collection titled Insightful Life Lessons from My Personal Stories.

Not all of them created unicorn businesses, but they significantly impacted their own and others’ lives.

Here is a summary of the ten lessons I learned from successful people in my circles through my observations and interactions over the last few decades.

1 — Holistic Approach to Health and Well-Being

2 — Optimistic Attitude with Growth Mindset

3 — Having Gratitude and Working in a Flow State

4 — Understanding the Value of Time and Money

5 — Tolerating Uncertainty But Investing Methodically

6 — Acting with Empathy and Compassion Supporting Charitable Causes

7 — Taking Personal Responsibility for Mistakes and Good Outcomes

8- Growing Incrementally and Leading to Freedom

9 — Solving Problems and Making Decisions Timely

10 — Building Lasting Relationships with Effective Communication

I explained these points in an article titled Here Is What I Learned from Healthy, Wealthy, and Happy People: Notable characteristics of successful people in various walks of life, based on observations and experience.

Hector always reminded me of Nicola Tesla, who came into my lucid dreams several times. They had a lot in common. However, as he studied Tesla’s life, Hector did not make the same mistake. Therefore, he relatively had a happier life than Tesla.

Hector mentioned that Tesla needed more emotional intelligence to balance his disproportionate intellect.

The best part of Hector’s story was when he retired from the workforce. He donated 80% of his income to those he needed for various reasons.

Hector will most likely be a centenarian considering his excellent health. He still learns new things every day after his retirement, making him a master polymath with a sharp mind.

As I became a good friend of Hector after my research, he shared several of his health improvement techniques with me during the family visits. I still learn a lot from his wisdom. Thus, I plan to share his health transformation in another article.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

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