When FIFA announced the final matchups for the 2014 World Cup, the selections brought tough news for U.S. soccer fans. Team USA was placed in a group with Germany, Portugal, and Ghana. Germany and Portugal are both ranked among the top five teams in the world and Ghana beat the United States in the previous two World Cups. For Team USA, it’s a “group of death.”

Aileen Lee’s popular article on “unicorns”—startups with billion-dollar or more valuations—uncovered a number of potential signals for identifying successful founders. Based on her findings, founder age, experience, and prior working relationships all could be indicators of future success. One of the strongest and most concrete potential signals is where founders were educated, and particularly, whether or not they went to Stanford—a third of the 39 unicorns were founded by Stanford graduates.

In this season of giving thanks, it’s worth taking a step back from our lives in San Francisco and not only notice just how fortunate many of us in this city are, but also recognize those who made such prosperity possible. To paraphrase Jim Harbaugh, not many people are as lucky as us.

Aileen Lee’s article on the building of billion-dollar companies, which she calls the “Unicorn Club” because they represent 0.07% of venture-backed startups, has become a common reference in many Silicon Valley conversations about startups. As an employee of one of these unicorns, Yammer, I’m proud to have been a part of our growth over the past three years. I believe that the founders of Yammer, David Sacks and Adam Pisoni, can offer many insights on what it takes to start something special.

On November 3, we all went through the familiar ritual of changing our clocks back an hour at the end of daylight saving time. Originally introduced to reduce energy consumption during World War I, DST (which is when clocks are ahead an hour—when it gets darker later—during the summer) potentially affects things far beyond how light it is when we get up. TV-watching patterns, crime rates, and our drinking habits could all be altered by this twice-annual change.