Startup Vision
The vision is the direction of the startup. It must be clear and simple, a complex vision make it difficult for people to understand. The vision of Bill Gates is simple: “Put a personal computer within each and every business or home in order to assist them in their everyday work, and make sure all of them use Microsoft software.”
In an interview about the success of Microsoft, Bill Gates explained: “It is our vision which has not altered since the day the company had been founded”. He knew ahead of what software could become - because people can buy PCs from a lot of hardware companies but all will work on the same software, his software. At that time (1982) when most companies were focusing on hardware (IBM, HP, Apple, and Atari etc.) he already positioned his company to dominate the industry with his software. That was what a great vision should be – looking forward to the future and target the largest market possible.
In order to overcame many challenging tasks, Bill Gates and his team developed software 24 hours in the earlier days of Microsoft to make his company grew fast. He said: “We did not want to have product which was not a dominant product”. As a startup, Gates had always wanted to hire far more software people to create a complete collection of software products. This contradict with business theories about “moving slowly and avoid risk” He said: “We did not avoid risks, in entrepreneurship you must take risk.” Besides doing that, Gates aimed high by starting at the local market with MS DOS, quickly move to the national market by eliminate PC DOS and captured the market controlled by IBM, and ultimately captured the world market with Window. And he did it with the same simple but powerful vision. He wanted Microsoft to build a lot of quality products as it possibly can. He said: “We never saw ourselves as confined. We follow our own magic formula to put quality software in everything we do.”
Even when he resigned from Microsoft in 2008, he continued to motivate his people. He declared: “This is only the beginning. In the future, computers would become a lot more involved with socializing people, educating individuals, allowing people to do more things and engaging the manners in which market segments are structured and Microsoft will play a very important role in regard to this.”
Simply by focusing on computer software which was something that he understood well, he realized there is a special opportunity that others overlooked and built a company on it and emerged as one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the 21st century. Just when he turned 32 in 1987, He was the country’s youngest billionaire with $1.5 billion. Few years after that, he was the richest person on earth with $64 billion. When he was visiting CMU, he advised students: “Having a vision is everything. It sets the direction for your company and you must make sure that everybody understands it.”
Many entrepreneurs assume that their people understand their vision. Often there is a big gap between their vision and what their people see as the vision. Unfortunately many entrepreneurs do not know how well they have expressed their vision to their people. Many entrepreneurs confused vision and speech. I have seen vision written in several pages based on a speech that they gave to their people. This lead to confusion about the direction of the company as people perceives things differently. The successful entrepreneurs are those who can clearly communicate the vision in a way that everybody in the company can easily understand. They do not assume that what they said is what people heard. They often check to make sure that the vision they said is the same vision that the people have. When the vision is not clear, people may have different opinion on what it is then do whatever seems best to them.
In my Entrepreneur class, I always remind students that if they cannot state a vision in one or two sentence than they do not have a vision. A simple way to test a startup’s vision is asking people to write down the vision on a piece of paper. If they can write it correctly, than you are doing a good job in communicate your vision. If not you can prepare yourself to better communicate your vision in the future.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
