The Unfair Advantage
The advantage nobody talks about
Description
In 2011, two men met at a startup event in London. One was Ash Ali, a self-taught coder from a working-class Pakistani family in Birmingham, who had left school young and taught himself to build websites. The other was Hasan Kubba, a first-time founder trying to make sense of why some startups took off while others, seemingly just as good, went nowhere. Ali had been the first marketing director at Just Eat, the food-delivery company that would later float on the London Stock Exchange for over a billion pounds. He had watched, from the inside, which founders won and which lost. And the pattern he saw did not match the story everyone kept telling about grit, hustle and sleepless nights.
The story goes like this: work harder than everyone else, want it more, refuse to quit, and success will come. It is the story startup culture tells on stage, in memoirs, in the captions under founders' faces. Ali and Kubba noticed something awkward about it. The founders who made it did work hard — but so did most of the ones who failed. Something else was doing the heavy lifting, something the winners rarely mentioned and often did not even see in themselves. They wrote a book about that something, and gave it a deliberately uncomfortable name.
The Unfair Advantage, published in 2020, argues that meritocracy is a story we tell to make outcomes feel deserved. Behind almost every success sits an edge that had little to do with effort — money, a network, timing, an education, a personality that fit the moment. The provocation is not that this is depressing. It is the opposite. Once we stop pretending the field is level, we can find the advantages we actually hold and use them, instead of grinding against the ones we don't.
The question we’re asking : If hard work alone doesn't explain who wins, what does — and can it be named honestly without either excuses or false modesty?What we’ll see : How two founders took apart the myth of the self-made success and replaced it with a colder, more useful map of where real edges come from.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The myth we were sold about hard work
The book opens by picking a fight with the most flattering idea in business: that success is earned through effort, and effort alone. It is a comfortable idea because it makes winners feel virtuous and lets everyone believe the door is open. Ali and Kubba don't deny that hard work matters — they insist it is necessary. Their point is that it is nowhere near sufficient, and that treating it as the whole story quietly misleads the people who most need honest advice.
The evidence is everywhere once we look. For every founder who worked eighty-hour weeks and built something huge, there are thousands who worked just as hard and got nothing. The ones we hear from are the survivors, and survivors write the rules retrospectively. They attribute the win to the trait they can see in themselves — determination — and skip the parts that are harder to admit: the family who covered rent during the lean year, the university friend who made an introduction, the fact that they happened to launch a payments idea the month the market was ready for it.
02Chapter 2 — MILES, or where advantages actually hide
Having dismantled the myth, the book needs something to put in its place, and this is its central contribution: a framework the authors call MILES. It stands for five kinds of unfair advantage — Money, Intelligence and insight, Location and luck, Education and expertise, and Status. The claim is that almost every real edge a person holds falls into one of these five buckets, and that most of us underrate how many we actually possess.
Money is the obvious one, the advantage everyone assumes the word means: a safety net, seed capital, the freedom to take risks without going hungry. But the authors are careful to widen the lens immediately. Intelligence and insight isn't only raw IQ; it includes emotional intelligence, creativity, the knack for seeing a problem others miss. Location and luck covers where and when we were born, the city we live in, the timing of a market — the things we didn't choose but can still ride. Education and expertise is both formal schooling and the skills we pick up on the job. Status is reputation, confidence, the way we're perceived, the doors that open because of how we carry ourselves or where we come from.
03Chapter 3 — Advantages are not fixed, they are built
The obvious objection to a book about unfair advantages is that it sounds like fatalism dressed up as insight. If the winners were always going to win because of things they were born with, why bother? Ali and Kubba spend much of the book heading this off, and it's where their argument turns from diagnosis to method. Only some advantages are fixed. Most can be grown, and a few can be manufactured almost from scratch.
Take status. It feels like something you either have or don't, but the authors treat it as buildable — through delivering good work publicly, showing up consistently, associating with the right people, earning a reputation one interaction at a time. Education and expertise is the most obviously acquirable: skills compound, and the internet has made specialist knowledge cheaper to obtain than at any point in history. Even luck, the least controllable of the five, responds to behaviour. Putting yourself in more rooms, shipping more things, meeting more people — this widens the surface area on which luck can land. You can't summon a lucky break, but you can raise the odds of one finding you.
04Chapter 4 — The playing field was never level
Step back from the framework and the book is making a broader argument about how startup culture narrates itself. The dominant story is the self-made founder: someone who started with nothing, believed hard enough, and willed a company into existence. It is a story that flatters the teller and sells well, and it has become the unspoken template against which everyone else measures their own struggle. The Unfair Advantage's real move is to call this narration dishonest — not because founders lie, but because they genuinely cannot see the scaffolding that held them up.
There is a well-documented reason for that blindness. We remember our own effort vividly because we lived it, while the help we received fades into background. The loan from a parent, the degree that got the first interview, the accident of being born in a city with venture money — these feel like context, not causes. So the founder honestly attributes the win to grit, and passes that explanation on to the next generation as advice. The advice is sincere and mostly useless, because it describes the one ingredient that was least decisive.
05Conclusion
Ash Ali came into the startup world from the outside — no capital, no connections, a self-taught skill and a reading of the market that most people missed. That combination, in the framework he would later co-author, was his own particular stack of advantages: insight, expertise, and the timing to ride a wave. The book he and Hasan Kubba wrote is in some sense a report from that vantage point, an attempt to hand others the map he had to draw for himself.
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