What we talk about when we talk about vision
In most cases, what we call “vision” is actually the myth: a rationalization after the fact of what a company did in its past. The difference matters.
Stewart Butterfield is a guy with a history of screwing up. In 2002, Stewart started a company called Ludicorp, to make a video game called Game Neverending. Unfortunately, the game was too complicated and weird to catch on: Ludicorp was never able to raise money and Game Neverending had to shut down.
However, Butterfield noticed that, while the game as a whole wasn’t doing great, users loved one feature that allowed sharing photos. They refocused their efforts on that feature alone, which they called Flickr and sold to Yahoo one year later.
Stewart’s desire to launch a new kind of game had not faded in the process, and Flickr’s success had made him bankable in the Silicon Valley. So he raised $17m and went to build Glitch, which should have been Game Neverending 2.0. But again, Glitch was too unfamiliar to its audience, it didn’t catch on, the company ran out of cash and the game was shut down.
However (once more), during the development of Glitch the team had developed an internal chat system. They figured that if it served their needs so well, it might work for other companies too. So they refocused their efforts on that feature alone, which they called Slack, a communication tool now worth a cool $12b.
Stewart Butterfield founded Flickr and Slack - both by accident.
While Stewart Butterfield’s story is exceptional, its core components are very common: an entrepreneur sets out on a certain path, and along the way discovers something entirely unexpected, which turns out to be the better idea. This was the case for many if not most tech startups. Microsoft started as a BASIC compiler for the Altair 8800. Apple started as a semi-DIY computer on a wooden board. And Mark Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook just to show Harvard he could build an online registry of its students faster than it would.
That this happens shouldn’t come as a surprise, either. After all, whoever does anything new is navigating uncharted waters, and will make a lot of discoveries along the way. And if a very valuable concept is very obvious, someone else is probably already working on it, so chances are that a breakout success will come out of a serendipitous, counter-intuitive idea, and not what you thought you’d do when you started out.
The problem with the “Vision”
I’m pointing these stories out because they fly in the face of one of the most popular narratives in technology: that of the “vision”.
Vision is an ubiquitous word in entrepreneurship. Great entrepreneurs are being praised as visionaries, failing companies on the other hand lack vision. Think “vision”, and you’ll immediately conjure the image of a captain at the helm of a ship, steadfast through the storm, eyes on the horizon, lone in seeing a faraway destination and its riches.
That makes sense after all. It’s easier to justify great success by the fulfilment of a great vision, rather than by pure luck. But where was the vision in the early days of Flickr or Slack? Where was it at the inception of Microsoft, Apple or Facebook? There was a vision, but it wasn’t the one that brought these companies success in the end.
I argue that, when we use the word “vision”, we can actually refer to two very different things:
The vision, meaning where the company intends to go in the future
The myth, a rationalization made after the fact that fits what the company did in its past, and that brought it to where it is today
In this post, I am going to argue that most of the times, when we talk about the vision, we are talking about the myth. I am going to argue that the original vision has little to do with where a company gets, but then a myth gets slapped on the company’s history to simplify its narrative. I’m going to argue that the most important driving force of a company is not its vision, but the psychology of its founders. And I’m going to argue that a “vision”, far from being an indicator of success, can be a hindrance.
Okay? okay. Let’s go.
Vision doesn’t drive a company
Let’s start with the role of the vision in the building of a company. The story usually goes: an entrepreneur saw a great opportunity. He or she then built a scrappy MVP in their garage, got first customers, raised money and developed the venture to become the global juggernaut we now know.
The examples at the beginning of the post show that, while such a case may happen, it is by no means the only way. In many cases, the entrepreneur sets out on a certain path but then discovers something better, more valuable but less intuitive, while working on it, and that ends up becoming the main business.
Once a product is a success, it is all too easy to weave a visionary narrative, and state that that was the goal all along — but it’s usually not the case. This happens in much the same way as a gambler (or trader) who wins may state to have exploited a pattern in the roulette results (or stock market), whereas they were just lucky.
But that vision, meaning saying after the fact that this was what you wanted to do all along, is not vision at all, it is myth: the romanced version of your history. It’s what you say you always wanted to do — it’s not necessarily what you intended to do at the time.
How a company evolves
So if the company’s “vision” is usually a myth, and the myth is a by-product of where the company got, what is the “atom”, the indivisible brick out of which the company — and ultimately its myth — gets formed? What are the elements in the path of a company that, slowly, get it to where it was destined to go, and allow it to create its myth?
I would argue that the atom of the company is the decision. But not in the sense of big, strategic, make-or-break decision: the tiny, day-to-day tactical decision. When building a company — indeed when building anything — hundreds of decisions are made every day. Each one of these will influence the company very slightly, leading it in one direction rather than another. What copy will we write on our website? Will we use Slack to communicate or email? Should I go pitch customer A or B?
Each one of these may sound insignificant, but they all compound to create what we ultimately see as the company. When writing the myth of the company, the important decisions will be singled out, the bad ones downplayed or omitted altogether.
Seeing these decisions as the building blocks of the company, and of its myth, helps get a clearer picture of the hazardous paths companies take, separate the contributions of will and those of chance. It also helps to understand the importance of the company’s founding team.
Why founders are so important
It is often repeated in venture capital circles that you don’t invest in a company, but in a team. I have generally seen this understood as meaning that a good founding team will work harder, be smarter about their ideas, understand more quickly when to give up or where to pivot. But it may be true on a much deeper sense.
Think about those hundreds of tiny decisions that need to be made. Each one of these will fight for the founders’ attention, and different founders will distribute their attention in different ways. The founding team of Microsoft was probably very bored, from the beginning, by considerations of design. They were however very focused on partnerships. The situation was the opposite at Apple.
Hundreds of times every week, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had to make tiny decisions, and their biases pushed them in one direction or another. Steve may have been very slightly more likely to skip that meeting with an important enterprise partner. Bill may have been very slightly more likely to wave away a design decision.
While any one of these decisions may not have been critical for their companies, over the years they compounded to a diametrically different direction for the firm.
Like a tree growing slanted because of the predominant wind or a rock getting shaped by dripping water, companies slowly acquire their shape after thousands of seemingly meaningless nudges.
The ultimate form of the company has much more to do with the biases of its founders than with the vision they had when embarking on their entrepreneurial journey.
Airbnb’s founders are designers. That led them to find growth hacks such as the famed idea of sending photographers to take decent pictures of listings, to improve the overall quality of the website. On the other hand, Priceline, the owner of sites like booking.com, is headed by operators. The entire company was saved from a debacle after the dot-com bust by abandoning any original idea and focusing on doing what everyone else was doing, but better.
Over the years, some of these decisions will work out. Some won’t, either because they were bad or because they were poorly implemented. What works will catch on and the remainder of the company will be built on top of them. Early decisions will remain embedded in the company, in a vestigial form, throughout its life, much like all lifeforms keep vestigial traces of their origins, since evolution can only add to an existing form and not start from a blank slate.
Regardless, the ultimate form which the company will have has much more to do with the tiny biases of its founders than with the vision they may or may not have had when embarking on their entrepreneurial journey. As the company grows and ages, the founding team may leave and be replaced. We will then start to talk about values, or company DNA: these will provide the basis for how the company will keep making these tiny decisions in the future.
How the myth is formed
But how do you communicate that? When talking to a new employee, to a journalist, or to your mom, how do you explain why you did what you did? Even if the atoms of which your project is constituted are the individual decisions you took, you can’t walk someone through all of them — nor would the result be intelligible.
That’s where the myth comes in: it’s a nice way to massage the more successful of your decisions into a cohesive narrative, that can be communicated in a couple of sentences.
The myth is a way to massage the more successful of your decisions into a cohesive narrative
Microsoft will tell you that they wanted to put a PC on each desk. Apple, that they wanted to make computers with a great design and easy to use. Facebook will tell you that they wanted to connect the world.
Did they? No, of course not. But that doesn’t really matter. That myth, which gets passed as a vision, helps understand where the company is headed better than recounting each one of its decisions would.
When vision becomes a bad thing
The ability to summarize one’s history in a couple of sentences is not a bad thing in itself, indeed it is vital. The problem comes from mistaking the myth for an actual vision, “An ideal or a goal toward which one aspires” as it is defined in Wiktionary.
Mistaking the myth for the vision means mistaking a backwards-looking concept for a forward-looking one. This can kill you if you start believing in it. Think of companies who had a great vision: Kodak had one in the 1990s. They were going to scale worldwide and keep dominating the film market — which is what they had done in their past. Remember how that worked out?
You may not know it but the very first self-contained digital camera was built by Steven Sasson, an engineer then employed by none other than Kodak, as early as 1973.
The world’s first self-contained digital camera, developed by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1973
This idea was shelved, because executives felt it could threaten the company’s film business. Management had such a hard time imagining a world beyond film, that when sales of film started declining in 2001, they attributed it to the September 11 attacks. This once great company now sells £4.99 selfie sticks, accessories to devices they were prevented from bringing to the market by the force of their vision.
Kodak had a great vision. Nokia and RIM also had them in the 2000s. So did MySpace. All of these visions were pointing these companies straight into the ground.
Mistaking the myth for a vision will get your company to keep replicating what made it successful in the past, and that is bound to stop working when your competition gets wise to your methods.
Wrapping up
If the vision is usually a myth, and if the myth is a summary of past achievements and not an indication of where a company is headed, then the myth represents what is, in Donald Rumsfeld’s words, a list of known unknowns. The myth is a summary of the challenges a company overcame, of the obstacles that were then unknown, but past which the company managed to navigate. The future of any company worth its salt is filled with unknown unknowns, things we don’t know that we don’t know. Anyone whose vision would allow them to safely navigate these circumstances would be a prophet, not a businessperson.
Facing unknown unknowns requires a vision — in the true, forward-looking sense — but one that may be invalidated, and have to be shelved. Doing that requires flexibility and ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. For this, a strong vision may be a hindrance. That’s where frameworks such as design thinking come in: methodologies that fully embrace the uncertainty and that are built around coming up with solutions to problems you don’t yet know that you have.
As for how to explain to your mom why you’ve had to change course… that I’m not sure.
