Founder Vision

I work with a lot of startups, and I always start with one question: what is the vision?

Here's why vision is crucial for startups:

First, vision is crucial for startups because it provides a clear sense of direction and purpose.

A well-defined vision helps founders and teams:

- stay focused on long-term goals

- align their efforts

- make decisions

Take Elon Musk. He's been working on his various startups with one common vision: to make life a multi-planetary species.

Everyone knows about Tesla and Spacex among others. But what about his vision for X?

Not everyone knows X has been a life long pursuit.

The original X.com was an American online bank founded by Musk in 1999 after he sold his previous company.

The vision? transform the traditional banking industry.

It didn't happen.

In 2000, it merged with competitor Confinity and in 2001, the merged company changed its name to PayPal.

The vision almost came true.

But Paypal as fallen short of that audacious goal.

Most people would give up and most onto something else. Founders don't.

Musk kept hold of the X.com domain name.

It's clear now he wanted to continue the pursuit of remaking online finance.

But would he?

For 20 years, that was that.

Until it wasn't.

Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022 and eventually its largest shareholder with a 9.1 percent stake.

More importantly, he wanted to finish the job and build the ultimate "everything app"

Aside from building the everything app, Musk stated that he planned to introduce:

- new features to the platform

- make its algorithms open-source

- combat spam

- promote free speech

Part of what founders do best is relentless innovation and improvement.

After a lot of litigation and court trials, Twitter was taken private and renamed as a new company: X Corp.

Two years later, that vision is still in doubt, according to many.

However, those people miss that nothing is more important in business than vision.

Never write founders off.