TBC: Can You Pitch a Big Vision?

TBC123: Can you pitch a big vision?
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Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the Back Channel. In today's episode, I want to talk about the idea of, can you pitch a big vision? I think a lot of founders, when they're advised around crafting a story around their pitch to venture capitalists, they're always reminded that they need a really big vision, and there is some real truth to this.

Of course, a venture capitalist has a certain business model that requires them to underwrite any of their investments to be large multiples, or at least the potential to be a large multiple from where they're investing. And when you do the math, a lot of times that means in the billions, multiple billions of dollars, and maybe even more in today's market.

Now, some people think that that means that they absolutely need to go throw out the biggest possible vision that they. That they can come up with. And what I would say is it is important to have a big [00:01:00] vision, especially if you really believe that that's where you're going and the type of business that you wanna run.

Something that deserves venture capital. But I also think you need to be realistic around what sort of credibility you build up to, and if you have the ability to even express that large of a vision. So what I mean by this is of course, if your vision is I want to build flying cars, and you, you think that that is the ultimate vision for where you're going, do you have the background to be talking about that?

Do you have the background to be expressing even the ability to get there or do you have traction that is showing you at least directionally pointing there? If not, it may be hard for those things to land. With the listener

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now. Now I know that there is this story around, uh, the founders of Airbnb talking to YC about their pitch, uh, when they were in YC and one of the, one of the leads of YC being like, no, you need to add a zero in terms of the number of hotels or the revenue that they could do.

You need to think bigger and. In that sense, it might sound like a, a young founder was being given the direction to just make the biggest possible vision that he, that he could come up with. But you have to remember, they had the backing and credibility of YC with them. So there is a sense that an investor could dream alongside them.

So all I'm saying is. If you want to express a big vision, make sure that you're able to build up to it in a way that allows someone to take the steps from who you are today, what you've done so far, and what it'll take to get there for you to [00:04:00] achieve that big vision. If you come straight out the gate saying, I'm going to cure cancer, I'm going to have a flying car, I'm going to.

Create cold fusion and they don't have any idea how you could actually get there. Well, you might have put yourself in a bad position. Okay, so think about big visions for sure, but make sure you combine both what your cred credibility is, what your current traction is, and how you lay out the story to get there as prerequisites for sharing a big vision like that.

Okay. I hope this makes sense to you. I hope you do pursue big Visions, but do your best to make sure that you can communicate in a way that makes it accepted by as many people as possible. All right. I will see you guys on the next episode of the Back channel.

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