Season Two Kickoff - David vs Goliath: How Small Teams Win Big

In this season opener of the Unicorn Leaders podcast, Fahd Alhattab sets the stage for a new narrative—one centered around the underdogs. Drawing inspiration from the classic David vs. Goliath story, Fahd explores why small, scrappy teams often outperform their larger, better-resourced competitors. Using Google's historic win over Overture as a launch point, he teases a season packed with modern business stories—from tech startups to industry disruptors—showcasing how trust, speed, culture, and strategic clarity help small teams punch far above their weight.

With upcoming guest interviews and deep dives into companies like Slack, Pixar, Netflix, and Shopify, this season is designed to unpack what really makes high-performing teams succeed. Whether you're a founder, people leader, or just team-curious, this season promises to deliver the tools and insights to help your team win—no matter the odds.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to the Unicorn Leaders Podcast. My name is Fahad Al-Hattab. I am your host and I'm the founder and CEO of Unicorn Labs. And for this season, I'm excited. I'm excited because we're going to dive into the David versus Goliath stories of teams. Of how these small but mighty teams overcome the competition. You know, for years, I've been personally obsessed with this idea. Why is it that small teams, the underdogs, they so often find a way to beat out the bigger, more resource competitors. What is it about them? It shouldn't make sense, right? The bigger companies, they've got bigger budgets and they've got more people. They've got more resources. They've got the best technology. They've got the most intelligent people. They're the big guys. You'd think they'd win every time, but they don't. Why? What is it about their teams? That's exactly what we're going to explore in this podcast. I mean, think about the ancient story of David versus Goliath. Everyone sort of knows it, and everyone at first expects Goliath to win. He was bigger, he was stronger, he was more experienced, but David had something that Goliath didn't. It was his agility, his precision, his willingness to fight differently. That's the same in business. That's perhaps the same in some of our small tech companies. They don't win because they're trying to be big. They win because they're willing to work smarter, they're They win because they lean into their size, their speed, and they trust each other. Actually, they win because they exploit a certain part of the market that everyone else wasn't expecting. Let's look at a more modern day versus Goliath, right? One of the classic stories. Back in the early 2000s, some of the brightest minds were in a tech race, and they were trying to essentially invent the pay-per-click model for search. And you had a lot of different competitors going after it. And one of the biggest competitors was Overture. Overture was the favorite. They were a company that essentially invented the pay-per-click model and they were winning in the search advertising and online advertising. This was worth billions of dollars. Actually, in fact, Overture had IPO'd and they had IPO'd for over a billion dollars. And their CEO, one of their founders, Bill Gross, out of LA, was known as the go-to entrepreneur of his time. They had a head start. They had more money. They had more infrastructure. They had better engineers. Everyone and the market included thought that they would win search and advertising and search we all know that's not how the story ended up actually if you're listening to this you very much know that Google won this Google this little small scrappy company that was still figuring itself out in 2000 during this month they won the race they won this moment and they were able to actually Now I just go from a$6 million a year company to$880 million a day company just from AdWords. And so we want to unpack what is it that Google did? What is it? What were the different elements of the team, of the strategy, of the culture, of the leadership, the organization, of the talent that was able to allow Google, the smaller upstart to win in this modern day David versus Goliath. And in fact, I'm not going to tell you the full story and why they did it just yet. I'm going to make sure you come to some of our episodes, listen to some of the next ones where we will explore the story of Larry Page and one of his star engineers, Jeff Dean, and just how they figured out a way to make the pay per click model work for Google ads so much significantly better than any other company, allowing them to essentially win. And so in the next episodes, we're going to explore many of these David versus Goliath stories and we're going to explore them and we're going to also try and pull out some lessons. What is it that they did from a psychological safety perspective and how they create high performing teams? What is it that they did from an empowerment perspective and how they give people freedom to make decisions and drive innovation? What do they do from a communication perspective to have really good feedback and debate and clarity on where things are going? What do they do from a culture of leadership, allowing different leaders to lead, a sense of purpose, a shared mission, and ultimately the vision. And we don't want it to be just theory. We want the stories. And we're going to be interviewing some phenomenal guests. And we're going to look at stories from Slack and stories from Pixar all the way to Netflix, but also some more homegrown stories, like perhaps some of our founders at Fullscript and founders of Shopify or smaller teams that we have in our regions. We want to look at the entire gambit because it's not just another leadership podcast. It is a podcast around teams and what creates high performing teams. So if you're ready to learn on how to unlock this potential of your team, what you can do as a founder, what the David versus Goliath did so that we can learn from them, don't miss an episode. When the next episode drops, check it out. Send us a message. Let's learn together and let's explore how small but mighty teams outperform the odds to win.