Clarity of Vision

I was traveling with one of my partners (John) yesterday. When you get out of the office with team members you often end up having great conversations that would never happen during the usual office hustle.

Yesterday we found ourselves with 45 minutes between meetings and just sat down to shoot the shit about the companies we have invested in and looked at. One observation that came out of that discussion is the importance of clarity of vision.

If you’ve met the Real Ventures team then you know that John and I are different beasts. John is all about big picture and vision. I’m more about execution, metrics, data. Together we can make great decisions, but we come at them from opposite ends of the spectrum.

For John, it is super important that an entrepreneur nail the pitch and have a crisp and clear vision for the product and business. This is not just about fundraising. When you have that clear vision it informs every decision you make in your business.

For example:

Each decision you make you have a crisp soundbite to go back to in order to ensure that decision supports the vision.

A clear vision can be a catalyst for attracting talent, media, partners, etc.

When we think of businesses that we were not that excited about, all of them lacked that a clear, crisp vision. Similarly, when we look at companies that are not executing to plan, in many cases, we feel they’d be executing faster if they had that soundbite to continually keep them focused.

So, for us now, clarity of vision is becoming a clear filter in our deal assessment process and key point to ensure we have in our companies.  In today’s lean, fail fast, customer-driven development World it’s possible that vision is not given the importance it should be. For us as long term investors looking to enable great companies and accelerated value creation, vision is super important.