Communication

How Great Founders Present Their Vision

We expect our leaders to have a ‘vision’. If you’ve ever felt your vision was hard to capture, you’re not alone.

Dave Bailey
Published in
4 min readSep 5, 2017

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The term vision was always too fluffy for my liking. It conjured up notions of countryside retreats, with campfires, guitars, and mild hallucinogenic drugs. To be honest, I was pretty unclear on what a great business vision actually was.

Then I started investing in startups, and I found myself asking founders to tell me about their ‘big vision’. I wanted to feel as excited about their idea as they were. But I needed more than a fuzzy statement to get me excited.

What makes a vision compelling?

It’s pretty clear that a vision should describe an inspiring future product that will help a large number of people — and make lots of money in the process. However, after hearing many responses to the ‘vision’ question, I noticed that the visions of great founders have something else.

Great founders make their vision seem inevitable.

How exactly do they do this?

Trends and watershed moments

We’re sold the idea that visionaries like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk can magically see into the future. However, what they’re really doing is spotting emerging trends and extrapolating them by five years. When they describe their vision, it’s their logic that convinces you — not magic.

You don’t need to be a visionary to have a vision. You just need to connect current technology and economic trends to future customer needs.

Given that trends take place over many years — or even decades — the next question to ask is: ‘Why now?’

Sequoia Capital, investor in Google, Facebook and other successful companies, says it best on their website:

‘The best companies almost

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CEO of Founder Coach, providing training and mentorship for the next generation of great CEOs. Visit FounderCoach.com for details.