Founder’s vision

Founders tend to be oddballs, but their vision is crucial for any company.

What do you think a typical start-up founder looks like?

Across the board, founders tend to be slightly strange, especially founders of successful companies. Whether they’ve been a bit off since birth or have become that way to emulate past great founders, almost every successful founder is somewhat . . . unusual.

Consider Paypal’s founding team: almost every member was a bit of an oddball. In fact, as teenagers, four of them even had the unusual hobby of building bombs!

This kind of originality is important because founders do far more than just start a company: they give it a vision. And this contribution is indispensable; no matter how refined a company’s management strategies are, it must have a vision to pursue.

Think about Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997. He’d been been kicked out over a decade earlier, and, in 2001, he launched the iPod, which analysts brushed off as nothing but a cool gadget for Mac users.

But the true genius of Jobs’s plan was revealed when Apple launched the iPhone and iPad, creating a family of Apple’s “post-PC devices” distinguished by their sleek looks and exclusive features.

Jobs had effectively made Apple the most valuable company in the world by following a carefully thought-out plan based on his vision.

As this success story shows, even a strong company, if it wants to perform at the highest level, needs the originality and vision of its founder.