Should early-stage founders be expected to articulate a grand long-term vision?

Harry Stebbings · Aug 14, 2024 · hedged

Visions can be dangerous because they constrain you to a smaller outcome than you might achieve.

His own original vision was to become an associate at a London venture fund; had he stuck to it he would have accepted that instead of raising $150M himself.

Scope: posed as a divisive question

7:30 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify

Harry Stebbings · Jul 27, 2025

Succumbing to a fixed vision constrains one's ability, which is why visions are undesirable

His own vision was to be an associate at Balderton in five years; had he succumbed to it he would never have ended up running his own $200M fund

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Harry Stebbings · Feb 16, 2026

Forcing founders to articulate a grand vision is counterproductive — visions are among the most constraining things asked of early-stage founders

Founders can't know the future; each chapter of a company is unlocked by the previous achievement, so no early founder could have accurately described where they'd end up

Scope: particularly for pre-seed companies

77:41 20VC: SaaS is Dead: Why Systems of Record Will Die in an Agentic World | What Revenue Multiple Will Software Companies Trade At? | From 7,000 to 3,000: We Need Less People Than Ever with Sebastian Siemiatkowski

Harry Stebbings · Oct 2, 2023 · hedged

Founders don't need to know their next chapter explicitly; you have to be playing the game to turn over the next card

Many of the things he has done he had no strategy for until he saw the opportunity

Scope: says he oscillates on this; 'I often feel that'

37:42 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP

Phin Barnes · Oct 2, 2023

Founders don't need to know the specific later acts of their business, but they must know there is more beyond the core product and want it, while still deeply respecting getting the first act right

He has experienced both patterns — founders who laid out three acts in the first meeting and founders like Ivan or Travis who didn't foresee later products — and the constant in both is knowing there is more than the core thing

Scope: both patterns can work

38:10 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP

Sebastian Siemiatkowski · Feb 16, 2026

What matters for founders is not knowing how you'll get there but being dedicated to the destination

He had no clue how Klarna would become what it is, but was dead dedicated to doing it

78:16 20VC: SaaS is Dead: Why Systems of Record Will Die in an Agentic World | What Revenue Multiple Will Software Companies Trade At? | From 7,000 to 3,000: We Need Less People Than Ever with Sebastian Siemiatkowski

Matthew Prince · Oct 16, 2023

A big vision is required not only for fundraising and recruiting but for the founder's own mental health when the work gets hard

You have to believe in the big vision to answer 'why is this so hard'

35:44 20VC: The Two Biggest Mistakes Every Founder Makes, Why Founders Are Not Ambitious Enough Today, Why Having a Narrow Target Customer is Dangerous & The Three Possible Outcomes in Company Building with Matthew Prince, Co-Founder @ Cloudflare

Bret Taylor · Oct 2, 2024

Great leadership requires both having a long-term vision and the ability to communicate it to employees and stakeholders so they will endure short-term pain

You have to tell people what the future looks like and why it matters in order to motivate the team to overcome short-term challenges; employees are the most meaningful audience

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Daniel Khachab · Oct 28, 2024

Founders should pitch a compelling, large, long-term vision rather than attach a specific outcome number to it

The vision is what lets you stand in front of your team in hard times and authentically say we need to work extra hard; it just needs to sound compelling, large and long term

48:30 20VC: Why SaaS is Dead | Why AI First Companies Will Win | We are in the Middle of a Cold War for AI Talent | Why Europe is F******* and We Need to Stop Whining with Daniel Khachab, Co-Founder @ Choco

Kaz Nejatian · Aug 14, 2024

Visions are not dangerous: everything good ever created started with someone deciding the world is wrong about something and setting out to fix it, and it is fine for the vision to change later.

Creating something to fix a problem requires knowing what you want at the end; Toby's vision was a snowboard store and Microsoft's first product was a bootloader for BASIC — both changed, but neither started by shipping code to see what happened.

Scope: you may be wrong about the vision and can change it

7:54 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify

Sebastian Siemiatkowski · Feb 16, 2026

Having a concrete long-term vision is worth holding onto — he explicitly rejects Harry's argument against visions

He wants to put Klarna's vision of a global retail bank that saves people time and money into reality; the journey of accomplishing it is what motivates him, not more money

82:17 20VC: SaaS is Dead: Why Systems of Record Will Die in an Agentic World | What Revenue Multiple Will Software Companies Trade At? | From 7,000 to 3,000: We Need Less People Than Ever with Sebastian Siemiatkowski

Harry Stebbings · Aug 10, 2022

Only about 5% of founders can articulate what their company does in ten words or less and tell a story with it

He asks every founder he meets the Times Square billboard question and almost none can answer it

Scope: based on his own founder meetings

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Stephane Kurgan · Jul 28, 2023

A seed or Series A founder who cannot articulate a crisp mission statement raises doubt about whether they know where they are going and what value they will deliver to clients

At early stage it should be straightforward to say what you stand for; it only gets hard once you are a large public company with multiple business units

Scope: mission statements do get genuinely harder at scale and for public multi-business-unit companies

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Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

When motivation fails, you should shrink the goal horizon to something immediate rather than contemplating the full distance — and the same applies to company ambitions

Fifteen more miles feels impossible while getting over the next hill feels doable; likewise 'how does Ramp become a $100B company' is harder to act on than 'how can we crush this quarter'

46:53 20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp

Fernando Fanton · Jul 27, 2025

Long-term visions are close to pointless; you should instead compound small improvements daily and weekly, in both companies and personal life

You cannot predict where you'll be in a year or two, and daily improvement compounds 365 times a year, taking you somewhere far from whatever you envisioned

Scope: applies to companies, health and personal development alike

4:41 20Product: Should We Kill the PM Role Entirely | How Does Product Design Change Most in a World of AI | How Do Monzo Build Product Today: What Works, What Does Not | Why Most Product Sucks and What Makes Truly Great Product

Harry Stebbings · Oct 28, 2024

Founders fail to articulate how their company becomes a $10B business, and European founders in particular are trained not to because it reads as arrogant or too idealistic

As an investor he needs to see the path to a billion dollars of revenue

48:15 European founders avoid articulating billion dollar outcomes fearing arrogance

Harry Stebbings · Oct 16, 2023

A grand vision alone does not attract great engineers; founders must show a credible journey from a concrete starting point to the big vision

An engineer hearing only a fluffy 'we're going to take on Amazon' pitch will dismiss it

27:16 Credible path from concrete start to vision is required to recruit engineers

Matthew Prince · Oct 16, 2023

Cloudflare could not have recruited the caliber of early people it did if it had pitched a narrower mission like protecting small business websites from cyber attacks instead of 'we're going to run the internet'

The maximally ambitious framing let them ask questions like 'if Cloudflare ran the entire internet, what would the right thing be?' and that attracted incredible people

27:44 Maximally ambitious framing attracts top talent more than narrow mission

Matthew Prince · Oct 16, 2023

Where you start matters as much as your stated vision, because teams optimize for the starting point and get stuck in local minima; founders must explicitly articulate the bigger vision

You can spend years on a local minimum you optimized yourself into

34:35 Starting point anchors teams into local minima so vision must be explicit

Tony Fadell · Mar 15, 2021

Most investors get scared off by genuinely bold visions, so founders learn to pitch only the narrow next three-to-four-year plan and hide the big picture

He has done this himself in his own startups; investors respond to big visions by telling founders to just do one little thing

36:21 Investors get scared by bold visions so founders hide them and pitch narrow plans