Not Every Venture is Created Equal
There is a fundamental difference between an entrepreneurial venture bringing something new to market — and a disruptive venture that represents a state change in the way an entire industry operates.
Disruptive ventures don’t just compete. They threaten entrenched power. And when something you have created begins to gain momentum — something that fixes what others couldn’t fix, makes available what wasn’t available before, or outshines an entire industry — you may find forces you never anticipated working against you. Governments. Industry leaders. Both.
History is full of examples. A software creator who spent seven years in prison rather than hand over his life’s work to intelligence agencies. A gold platform that was falsely accused of money laundering. A Nobel Prize winner who built a bank serving the world’s poorest people — only to have it extracted from him by the very government of his own country.
These are not cautionary tales. They are lessons in what it means to be truly disruptive — and what preparation is required.
What Exactly Are Your Delivery Keys?
Your Delivery Keys are the protections, protocols, contracts, backup plans, and strategic pre-thinking that ensure your venture survives and goes forward — no matter what forces arrive to challenge it. They are built before you need them, at the deal table, in the terms and conditions, in the business processes you establish from the start.
Watch this short video and find out what Delivery Keys are — and why the ventures that survive disruption are the ones that planned for the unthinkable.
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Read the Full Verbatim Transcript: “Your Delivery Keys” with Kim Greenhouse
Your Delivery Keys
There’s a distinction between an entrepreneurial venture that is bringing in a new product or bringing in a new project, and bringing in a highly disruptive venture that makes something available that’s not been available, that bypasses what everybody else has done.
Disruptive ventures are not just new products. They are a state change in the way an industry is doing something. And let me tell you, when you have a disruptive venture in your formation and you start to get momentum, you may find out that there are a lot of forces against what you’re doing. There’s entrenched forces. It could be governments. It could be industry leaders, it could be both. It could be people that some type of disruptive venture which fixes something, repairs something, makes something available which hasn’t been available before, outshines the entire industry.
So you can have an entrepreneurial venture, you can have a pioneering venture, you can have something that is different. But different is not industrial disruption. They’re different and have to be treated differently.
Let me give you a couple examples. Martin Armstrong of Armstrong Economics created a software program and worked seventeen years on it to be able to identify geopolitical conditions and when major events — even like war, to the day a war would start — that’s how disruptive, phenomenal, actually helpful what he created was and still is.
Well, the forces in the government that have to do with intelligence required him to turn over — not just share, not just help, which he was willing to do — but to turn over his creation, or they would put him in jail. And he refused to do it. And that’s exactly what he did.
Then they concocted that he had done something he didn’t do. Finally evidence came out about it, but he spent seven years in prison for being unwilling to give the keys to the intelligence agencies in what he created — and a kangaroo judge kept him in prison for not turning it over to the intelligence community.
So not every founder of something, not every creator has that kind of strength and fortitude and courage to stand up to forces like that.
I worked with a company back in 2007 — was a consultant to a company that had a gold product for the U.S. marketplace and eventually it would be international. And he was accused — this company was accused of trying to mimic a central bank, of money laundering — and he wasn’t laundering money. You see? And so let me give you another example. He had provided this incredible platform and solution in the gold business.
Then Doctor Mohammed Yunus of the Grameen Bank created a bank that would lend to the poorest of the poor. Phenomenal. And how would he do it? It would be uncollateralized lending. Exciting. All kinds of women-owned businesses for the first time, and new business owners could finally get some capital to start their business without having to go through the money changers. And you say this is so incredible — this would work in developing nations. This could fix world poverty. This could open up businesses where there could never otherwise be — exciting, right? Phenomenal.
I interviewed him in 2003 in December. And he got the Nobel Prize in 2006. And then in 2011, the government of the country he’s from extracted him from his creation and said he’s too old — and God knows what else they concocted — and removed him from the Grameen Bank. I think he had built it up to like a billion dollars or a billion, I don’t know if it’s a billion dollars or a billion rubies, but it was prospering, magnificently prospering. He’s like the Gandhi of micro financing.
So you take these examples — Martin Armstrong, remarkable, remarkable, of Armstrong Economics. You take this gold company, which I don’t want to mention, but the gold — the government of the U.S. went after him. And then you take the Grameen Bank. Phenomenal. The Clintons invited him to the United States. He spoke here. They started a few — there were a few nonprofits trying to copy what he did, and it was okay. He just wasn’t allowed to scale here. And then they extracted the bank from him.
Now it happens to be that now, believe it or not, he’s an interim leader of Bangladesh in the government. It’s funny how life can turn things around.
But the point here is that when you vision a company or a venture that is revolutionary, transformational, but also disruptive at an industrial level — you have some keys, Delivery Keys, you must get a hold of, that have to do with looking into the unexpected, the unplanned for, the unthinkable, when forces — not just of competition, but malevolent forces — come in to try to crush what you’ve created. And so there are Delivery Keys. I call this Delivery Keys because they have to be prepared. Okay?
What are you going to do if you’re not there anymore as the founder, chief executive officer, or the founding members? What happens if a government pays off another government to come in? And you can say, well, we’ll deal with that at that time. No. Let me give you an example. Whoever sat at the deal table with the Grameen Bank and Dr. Yunus — I can assure you, okay, he didn’t plan on it becoming so successful. Fine, you want to lend some uncollateralized banking money to the poor people — big deal, let’s do it. Nobody imagined it would be that big, that successful, able to be replicated.
So what I’m saying here is that where this shows up — the protections show up at the deal tables. They show up at pre-thinking terms and conditions. The Delivery Keys show up in contract, in business process, in protocols that are established, in backup plans.
And so I’d like to help those of you who not only have entrepreneurial ventures that will be facing massive competition, massive jealousy, unfinished business in markets, in the conditions in markets, forces coming in, etc. — and prepare, no matter what, what I call Delivery Keys, venture Delivery Keys. Where these keys are in place, so no matter what happens, these ventures can go forward.
Thank you very much for listening. Love to work with you and prepare The Delivery Keys. Book your appointment with The Rainmaking Company. Thank you so much.