Vision

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Let me give you an example of vision. This is my era, but Gates once envisioned a world where every desk had a computer and every home had a computer. That was a vision; it didn’t exist at the time. Now we take it for granted, and you might go further and say everybody has a phone. Visions don’t necessarily determine your success, but they guide you. They set a direction and give people a basis to think, “Well, what if every home had a computer, or every person had a phone?” The minute you assume everybody has a phone, you can take a whole bunch of things for granted: you could message everybody, share with everybody, put banking in everybody’s hands. Whole industries came out of the mobile revolution. A vision gives you the basis to set a direction you can pursue.

In my opinion it’s not terribly important what the exact words are. What’s much more important is that you can clearly get people on the same page about what you’re doing, rather than whether the words are perfect. Don’t feel you need the perfect word. Just be clear that you can articulate it, and that anybody you say it to says, “Oh, I get it.”

How precise does the vision need to be? A student pushed on this: it seems wide, it can mean so many things, and you want many people to join you, but at the beginning you need to be precise about your direction. Another pointed out that people use LinkedIn for networking even though “networking” isn’t in its lofty vision, because now it’s so popular everyone uses it for different reasons; but when you’re just starting, do you need to be that broad? I learned from that. There’s a very big difference between a starting vision and a late-stage vision at the size of LinkedIn. When you’re starting out with an incredibly broad vision that could be all things to all people, people wonder, “Well, what do you actually do?” So in the early days it should be as defined and as tight as possible, something everybody can relate to: “Okay, I understand, you do networking.” Then it can evolve to a bigger vision that incorporates all those broader words.

But here’s the other half. You also need room for it to grow. If a customer felt they were buying a feature from you that only did one thing (networking), they’d ask, “Where are you headed? I want to keep doing business with a company that can do all these things, create economic opportunity for me across my whole global workforce.” That’s when they say, “Great, this company has a nice feature, but also a vision for how I could work with them for years to come.” So vision matters on both levels: start somewhere simple where everybody can be clear what you have (that’s really a value prop), and be clear where your vision could take your customers and compel your employees to stay involved for the long term.

Take Google. Imagine Sergey and Larry starting a company that just said, “We are going to index all the world’s information.” Techy and interesting, but your mom wouldn’t be using that, and neither would you. Instead they made a vision and mission statement: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Now you get the “aha”: that’s why they’re indexing it all. It becomes interesting to speculate: what if you could get to all the world’s information, in libraries, on the web, captured by cars driving around streets to give you maps, all combined and used for many things? That’s why no hands go up when I ask, “Who doesn’t use Google?”

Developing your vision comes down to three things. First, how will your market evolve? Nobody has a crystal ball, and that’s the good news; nobody does. But based on your unique experience and understanding of that marketplace, you’ll have a view. Markets often evolve because somebody created an opportunity. Nobody told Edison there was going to be a whole set of markets around his innovation; he envisaged it. Great entrepreneurs don’t wait for the market to come to them; they go create it. Second, how will you lead it? Participating in a market is one thing; leading it is another, and that leadership can come from a business model shift, not just technology. Nobody wants to be number two, so articulate why you personally believe this vision leads you to number one. Third, you need a road map: the milestones that get you from your starting value prop to where your vision comes to life. The more credible milestones you can name, the more people believe in the vision.

Visions do evolve, and that’s okay. You might start clear that you’re addressing one market and realize over time it’s different than you first thought. Technology changes, customer patterns change. What’s important is that you keep having one, because otherwise you won’t be clear about the direction you’re trying to go.

Now, the road map is the bridge between value prop and vision, and it’s important even for customers. Here’s a little secret: customers don’t know they want this, but they do. When they’re dealing with a startup, they are not going to buy your first product; they’ll probably try it and spit it out, and end up buying your third version. Nobody talks about this, but it’s the truth, especially in software: you very rarely get the first product’s reliability, scalability and features right. So the road map is often about you sharing with a customer that you understand how their business is evolving, and that while you listen, learn, iterate and pivot, you’re developing a road map they can rely on to meet their needs.

My portfolio company Salsify (Jason, Jeremy and Rob) gave a real example. Their vision was that information would flow so seamlessly between the people who create products, the people who sell them, and all the distributors and outlets, that you’d literally be able to buy anything, anytime, anywhere, with the right information at the right time. It turns out to be incredibly hard: products constantly change, channels constantly change, people sell globally through two-tier distribution, and it’s a two-way world now (people comment, review, rate, add videos and how-tos). It’s a mission-critical, clearly broken process; you can’t sell without the right information on the product. Commerce would grind to a halt without it. So they became, in effect, the veins and arteries of information that enable commerce. That mission statement is compelling, and it became very easy for me as an investor to get engaged.

Jason built a company road map (loosely a product road map, but really a go-to-market and messaging road map) with four simple steps: first, make creation and management of that content easy (better than dealing with Microsoft Excel); then make sharing that content easier within and across organizations; then make collaboration and grading of content easy so a retailer like Walmart can say “I want more information here”; and finally, once you have all these brands and retailers participating, reuse of that content becomes possible.

That road map won them a customer. Philosophy, a cosmetics company, came in wanting essentially steps one and two, but Salsify could barely do part of step one. Jason thought there was no way they’d land them once they saw a demo missing all the features. But having the company road map (not the product road map) overcame the product objections. The VP of e-commerce said, “I love where they’re going. It’s aligned with where I want to go. I’m willing to bet a little bit on you guys.” And that’s how they landed one of their first customers. Same with B&H Photo, their very first customer: B&H competes with Amazon and Walmart on the quality and authority of their content, and they had eight people manually cross-referencing that these lenses are compatible with these cameras. Salsify used the attributes locked in the product data (like mounting type) to automate that. Interestingly, once the team looked at the road map, they decided for their own reasons that B&H’s direction wasn’t the right road map to pursue long term. So a road map can also tell you what not to do.

When do you present the road map to a customer? For Salsify it’s organic, an inside-sales model, so it comes up naturally in conversation. Most prospects, when they see a demo, ask, “Where are you going?” That’s not just about the product; it’s an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a relationship. And a follow-up: with a road map there’s an implied timeline, so aren’t you making promises you may not keep? The key is that Salsify positions it as a company road map giving a sense of direction, not a traditional product road map committing to feature-delivery dates. This conversation usually happens with the economic buyer (the person signing the check), who cares about direction; their team may care about specific feature dates, which is a distinct topic. When you’re a startup you have so little to show; a customer just needs confidence that where you’re going aligns with the problems they want solved.

Why does this matter so much early? Jeffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, underlines that early buyers are often visionaries. Think about that word: visionaries are looking for vision. If you don’t have a vision to sell to a visionary, you have nothing to sell them. You’ve got to have a connection with your audience that’s meaningful to them, and that’s usually a directional statement, a sense of what they can believe you’re going to do.