Think the expensive travel team is the path to the US Men's National Team. Think again.
Only about a third of Coach Pochettino's World Cup 26 came from that affluent club-soccer world. The rest came from El Paso, Pico Rivera, and Fresno, or from free European academies. Nineteen of the twenty-six reached the national team through a system that charged their family nothing. The expensive path was never the path.
The pattern is old. In the 1930s, MI5 hunted Soviet spies by watching working-class communist émigrés in Hampstead, and it missed the actual recruits entirely, because it could not imagine that idealistic young men from Cambridge would betray their country. It assumed the threat looked a certain way, so it stared at the wrong people while the real ones walked past in good suits.
Founders do this every day. You assume the talent comes from the logos you respect, the threat comes from the competitor you can see, and the next big customer looks like your current ones. You build your whole pipeline around what you expect, and then you are stunned by what you missed.
The uncomfortable part is that the thing you are looking for, the hire, the rival, the idea, is developing right now in the exact place your assumptions told you to ignore.
What are you so sure about that you've stopped looking, and what is growing in the spot you refuse to watch?
Enjoy the ride + Plan accordingly.
-Marc A. Ross
Founder @ Brigadoon
Brigadoon | Know what's next.
