| > Anybody could waste months and months working on the long-term vision and culture. In a startup, that's next to useless as everyone should contribute to the long term vision. It's the day-to-day that's important. Months and months for culture? I've spent the better part of a decade and multiple companies trying to perfect the perfect culture startup culture. Not having a vision for the culture of a startup is, in my experience, plain crazy for the mid-to-long term health of the company. Not having a long-term vision for the company itself also seems crazy for any of the founders. I always have a long-term vision. It usually overlaps heavily with my other founders. It changes when it is clearly the wrong path, but then we come up with a new vision and it certainly doesn't take months to develop. Sure, you take input from the team to smooth out the rough spots, but it is the job of the founders to be the genesis. For goodness sakes, the center of my pitch when raising VC money is getting people to buy into the long-term vision. I use the long-term vision to hire employees. I use it on early customers. I can't imagine not having one. > That's what an early startup is -- figuring out product/market fit, largely based on ad-hoc decision making like this. Picking a vision that just works is incredibly rare. It is not normal to scrap your product every time an investor suggests something different. That way be dragons. Every time you pivot, you have to have a rationale for doing so. It certainly isn't willy nilly ad-hoc decision making. Pivoting is a deliberate act. It involves developing vision for where the company will go, who the customer is and why they would use your product. You don't just take a random stab in the dark every time you try to get user adoption and don't immediately see 100 million users. And on angel money, you certainly don't have the runway to pivot more than a couple times. |