Vision: Why Now? AND For The Future.

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So then the question is: how big can this business be? That brings us on to what I’d describe as the vision and mission.

Startup Secret: Your vision is part of the story, and you need to know how to articulate it from day one. The most important thing: talk about the market. Talk about what you think your market is and how it will evolve. If it’s enterprise devices and you have a vision that there’s a phone in everybody’s pocket, a mobile device they carry around for every part of their job, and your vision is that you’re going to enable them to carry all the information they need with the simplicity of a click, accessible from the web, great. I’m doing a horrible job of articulating what Chuck may have had as his vision, but the point is he had a vision, and that vision was very clear when he started pitching to us. He also had a mission, which was to be the leading company to enable that whole mobile workforce to become effective in the use of their technology.

With that as a viewpoint, we then start to think about how you’ll get from here to there. If you talk to the founders of one of my companies, Demandware, it was e-commerce on demand. Even though that’s a very different company nine years later than when they started it, that vision has not changed at all. It was that basically you wouldn’t have to build all the infrastructure you need for putting your e-commerce site up; we would provide it to you on demand via the cloud. We learned a lot along the way in nine years, but that vision never really changed.

If I look back at many of the successful companies we’ve backed, or that you see in the tech world, their vision and mission very rarely changes. It might evolve in terms of products or the various solutions they provide as the market evolves. But this is fundamentally one of the great strengths we’re looking for in entrepreneurs: do they have the vision for how this market’s going to evolve, and how to lead it?

Startup Secret: If you’re not early with a vision, you’re probably too late. In the immortal words of Wayne Gretzky, you need to be skating to where the puck is going, not where it is. So you need to be thinking about what this market is going to look like typically in five to seven years’ time, even though that feels like an eternity, because that’s what it takes on average to build a business. If you look back at the average period for an exit to occur in the venture world, it’s actually more like seven or eight years at the moment. You’ve got to have the kind of vision that gives you the runway to go after building this business in that kind of time period. If you don’t have that, that’s okay, but it should be a qualifier and a pause for thought. Try to figure out where you might bring into your team that kind of visionary who can have an over-the-horizon view of what this market’s going to do.

Connecting the dots. What we’re looking for is people who not only have that vision, but also have the understanding of the various steps along the way that will enable them to build the business. How will the market evolve at each step? What will be the drivers? How will you meet those various changes in the marketplace? How will you develop your solutions and products to do it? By the way, that does not have to be in tremendous detail, but having that clarity of thought is important to us.

Here’s another example to bring it to life. Everybody’s talking about big data right now. I don’t think it’s very hard to have a vision that we’re going to have not just terabytes, but petabytes, yottabytes of data. That’s just obvious. Everything we do is being measured right now. The fact that I’m walking around with a cell phone on my belt, it’s being tracked somewhere, whether I want it to be or not. Data is being collected everywhere. So coming into us and saying there’s a vision for data exploding is not enough.

But coming into us and saying, as one of our recent investments did, that there’s a tremendous challenge associated with data that today is very structured, normally stored in rows and columns, in databases accessed from transactional systems like banking records, being merged with data that is unstructured, for example all the description of what it is that you bought and why you bought it and all the context in which you bought it, and that those two worlds are actually merging, that’s different. The vision this company had, the company’s called Kiban, was to bring them together in a single data store and to think about how applications would regularly use more and more of the combination of structured and unstructured data. And they would want to do that in a way that made it possible to do completely new things. For example, the minute you buy something, look up all the attributes that caused you to buy it, compare them with other people, and make recommendations right off the bat as to what other things you’d want to buy. It’s a common problem, but it turns out to be very difficult to solve if you have your data stored in two very disparate systems, structured and unstructured.