Hindsight Visionary

More often than not, founders, early employees, and investors of the largest tech companies will tell you that the product that took off was never part of (at least not fully) the original “plan.” Twitter spun out of Odeo, Instagram was a Burbn pivot, BuzzFeed evolved from one of many “for fun” experiments — the  list goes on and on. Heck, even Facebook was originally Facemash.

By and large, innovative products aren’t strategically imagined ahead of time – they’re stumbled upon while experimenting on-the-go.

Furthermore, even when the game-changing idea is discovered, the founders and early employees tend to underestimate its magnitude and potential. They’ll tell you that they knew the product was special but did not realize how how special it was or what it would lead to next. The best example of this: Google was a graduate school project that Larry and Sergey tried to sell for $1 million. And there’s no way that Jack, Ev, and Biz could have been predicted from day one that Twitter, the SMS-based prototype, would eventually enable revolutions and reinvent news media. But despite initially linear growth, they knew they had something special on their hands because the product they had built delighted themselves and a core group of addicted users. In the early stages of a product’s life, all you can know for sure is whether or not you’ve built something that delights yourself and others. The rest — how many others it will delight, and in what ways — is typically felt out along the way.

In other words, “vision” is a popular industry narrative applied after-the-fact.

Despite these patterns, investors require conviction and grandiosity from budding entrepreneurs. As a result, most “dumb” and “small” ideas never make it to pitch meetings or even prototyping, and instead die in the heads of talented builders. Unless you’re someone like Kevin Rose, you can’t walk into an investor meeting and say, “We’re not really sure what we’re building,” or “We’re not really sure how this idea evolves and gets really big yet,” and expect to receive funding. Which is a shame, given that Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Dropbox and the like were all initially “dumb” and “small.”