The Boy Who Cried Unicorn

Business analysis is fundamentally about predicting things. You have a model of the world, you feed current events into it—product launches, acquisitions, financings, etc.—and then you come up with a prediction of what will happen next.

When I first started writing Divinations, I did not realize this. I thought I was going to write about the timeless principles of business strategy, like trade-offs, wedges, and value chains. Turns out, these ideas are not worth much in a vacuum. The only way to make them come alive is by contact with reality. Only by attempting to use an idea can you truly understand it.

So, without really intending to, I’ve ended up making a lot of predictions over the past few years. Some were complete whiffs (I once claimed Quibi would be a multibillion-dollar company) and others were pretty spot-on (in the peak of Roam’s hype cycle, I said it would likely fail unless it got usage within teams).

I’ve never taken a step back and graded my predictions, but now that enough time has passed, I thought it might be fun to do just that. So this week’s post is pretty simple: I’ll grade five predictions I made in 2020 and see what we can learn from them.

1. Quibi will be a multibillion-dollar company (F)

It’s hard to be more wrong than this. The day Quibi launched, I wrote an article claiming that short-form premium video was here to stay. At the time this was totally against the conventional wisdom. Everybody thought Quibi would fail. Turns out, they were right.

Looking back, I think there were two big reasons I got this wrong.

The first is that it was relatively early in my writing career, and I was a bit eager to assert a bold contrarian claim. It was the first article in which I made a big prediction. After spending a few months writing explainers of classic business strategy ideas from thinkers like Michael Porter and Clay Christensen, I was ready to put those ideas to use. I was excited about the idea of being the lone voice who “called it” when everyone else had doubt. I should have been more patient.