Introducing The Unusual Method
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Unusual blog.
From Unusual Ventures’ inception, our mission has been clear: to redefine seed stage investing and build a firm that would provide founders with a distinct advantage through the hardest leg of a startup journey — from Idea to Product Market fit. Today we’ve taken an important step towards fulfilling our mission. We are proud to officially make available The Unusual Method and our Unusual Field Guide.
The Unusual Method is our proprietary approach to early stage company building based on our experiences building and investing in some of Silicon Valley’s best companies over the past 20 years. We are obsessed with decoding the best practices of the most successful entrepreneurs and packaging their lessons and techniques in an innovative way that will help founders win. The Unusual Method includes the core knowledge base we’ve assembled (the Unusual Field Guide), interactive workshops with hands on help from the successful entrepreneurs behind the lessons (Unusual Academy), and for our portfolio companies, full time operators who will join your team to produce the actual deliverables and results The Unusual Method is built on (Unusual Get Ahead Platform).
The Unusual Field Guide is now available on our completely redesigned website that was built on one non-negotiable principle — “Founders First” — and is organized around the critical obstacles that every early stage founder faces. Each obstacle has an associated module, which presents an example of a founder/company that overcame the obstacle, an abstract on the process that was followed, and a tool founders can use to put the process into action immediately and track performance. The Unusual Field Guide is not a book that needs to be read sequentially from Chapter One. We designed the resources to each stand alone, so founders can jump into the most relevant content for wherever they are in their journey. By publishing the Method on our website for free, we hope to stay true to our mission and help make specialized knowledge and tools more accessible for all founders.
We recognize that every founder’s journey is unique and that a lot has been written about early stage company building. But here’s how the Field Guide is different: it’s highly tactical, provides direct insight from the industry’s best experts, and is accompanied by tools founders can immediately apply to their startup today.
We’ve been iterating on the Unusual Method and the written Field Guide for several years in some shape or form. To finally launch it in a cohesive, organized way is an exciting milestone for our team. This is just the beginning, however. We have many more ideas, including adding multimedia formats and adding more examples and tools along the way to make the user experience even richer. The Field Guide is a living library and we will be adding additional content as we grow our own repository of startup knowledge. Our aim is to consistently improve and constantly raise the bar for our founders. To that end, we welcome feedback, so don’t hesitate to reach out. Thank you for being on this journey with us — we’re excited for what’s to come.
Onward!
