I spent six and a half years in undergraduate and graduate business school and I can tell you, without a doubt, that the worst taught topic was company vision. It’s clear, in retrospect, that not a single professor I had truly understood it (or at least could explain it in a way I could grasp).

Fred Wilson has a new sustainability post this morning, in which he shared a video of Dennis Crowley, founder and CEO of Foursquare, talking about the time when Facebook announced Facebook Places, Google announced Google Places, and everyone was competing with tiny Foursquare:

Fred goes on to point out that this is why we need a corporate vision. That vision keeps the company on the straight and narrow, focuses it on the long-term success of the business, not a short term roadblock.

Here’s what happens: small company starts to gain some traction, big company realizes it is something they should be doing and makes a build versus buy decision. If they decide to build the technology, whether that’s because small company rebuffs big company or because big company decides just to build their own, little company now feels overwhelmed by the competition.

But here’s the thing: big company has not thought about the problem for years, lived with it and experienced it first-hand. Big company is a mercenary, bent on getting into the space because they think they need to. Small company, meanwhile, lives and breaths this problem every day, talks to customers who live and breath this problem every day. And that’s the competitive advantage: the small company’s ability to solve the problem better than big company.

A vision is critical. Without it, the company gets waylaid by every distraction, every competitor, every decision point. And as for the CEO, if she doesn’t feel it in her gut, live and die by that vision, then the company will never make it.

Mark Suster wrote a great post about a year and a half ago that has been sitting in my box waiting to be added to the blog. His post, 9 Women Can’t Make A Baby In A Month, highlights the argument for time in building a business:

Markets develop for a complex set of factors that are often beyond all of our control. It is often the fortuitous mixture of new technologies, customer awareness and then acceptance of the technology and then the slow adoption into our daily lives that leads to markets exploding.

Nascent startup markets are like fine wine, they take time to develop.

But that’s not the only important point in his post, although he doesn’t directly assess this one: constraints are critical. The early stages of company development are all about constraints. Small team, small budget, limited time, tight product description, limited marketing reach, tiny sales staff. Feature creep is dangerous. Every decision must be carefully considered.

True innovation occurs through constraints, and having a small team is just one way to force constraints into the system.

Seth Godin wrote a thought-provoking article last week on how markets are overstimulated. Too many products chasing too many people trying to be all things to all people. And of course the press loves these kinds of apps and talks about them a lot. The best quote:

If you’re entering a market filled with loudness, it’s harder to be noticed, even if the incremental benefit you offer seems large to you. If you’re trying to delight existing customers, the more delighted they already are, the more new delight you need to offer to turn heads.

I’m guilty of forgetting this. In the pursuit of making a living wage it seems we have been constantly trying to attract more customers to powerOne. Of course this is what the App Store does to productivity apps because the opportunities for recurring income (whether upgrades or subscriptions or whatnot) is so limited. So we are constantly looking for the next 1000 customers to pay us $4.99.

This isn’t sustainable. We need to move to a model that supports us so we can focus on our core set of customers that care deeply about our products, use them every day, and need them to work effectively. I want to make our products better for those that care and are willing to pay for them, not worry about attracting more and more customers who really aren’t discerning about the true benefits of our software.

Yesterday’s post reminded me of this graph that I once saw from Paul Graham of Y Combinator but more recently via Andrew Chen:

If you put the two back-to-back, this might be what you get, if you have a successful launch. The Promised Land! is product/market fit. I seem to perpetually be in the Trough of Sorrow!