Asher's Blog

Founders live in the future; we see the company before the company exists. We see the product working before the first complete version has been built. We imagine customers using it, employees joining us and markets changing around an idea that may still look improbable to everyone else.

That is not unusual for a founder. You would probably not start anything genuinely difficult if you could not see beyond the evidence immediately in front of you.

Paul Graham describes one way of finding startup ideas as living in the future and building what is missing. I like that idea because it captures something fundamental about founders: we often experience a future possibility as though it is already becoming real. We are not merely admiring an idea from a distance. We can see how the parts might fit together.

However, seeing the future is only half of the work. A founder must also survive long enough to reach it.

That requires a difficult combination. You must hold a long-term conviction while remaining brutally responsive to present facts. You must believe that there is a way without becoming emotionally attached to only one way. You must keep the destination in view while changing the road as many times as reality demands.

This is why foresight matters. It is also why foresight should never be confused with optimism.

Foresight is not positive thinking

Optimism says, “I believe this will work.” Foresight asks, “If these conditions continue, what is likely to happen next?”

The distinction matters. A founder can be extremely optimistic and still make poor decisions. Optimism may provide the energy to continue, but it does not automatically tell you whether a hire will succeed, a partnership will fail, a customer segment will pay or the company will run out of cash.

Good foresight is closer to disciplined imagination. You take information from several places—customer behaviour, cash flow, employee performance, regulation, technology, incentives and your own experience—and use it to form a view of what may happen. The “algorithm” is rarely written in software; it exists in the founder’s accumulated pattern recognition.

Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner argue in Superforecasting that good prediction is not a mysterious gift reserved for a few brilliant people. Better forecasters break large questions into smaller ones, update their beliefs as evidence changes and resist the temptation to become too certain. That is useful advice for founders because the future is never presented to us as a complete picture. We construct a view from incomplete signals.

If a new hire is already avoiding responsibility in the first month, foresight asks what the team will look like after a year if nothing changes. If a partner repeatedly misses commitments, foresight asks what will happen when the stakes become larger. If costs are growing much faster than revenue, foresight asks how many months remain before an inspiring vision becomes a liquidity crisis.

Foresight is not claiming to know exactly what will happen. It is noticing direction early enough to act.

The future is usually visible in weak signals

Companies rarely collapse because of one completely invisible event. More often, a collection of small warnings was ignored until it became one large emergency.

A key employee becomes less engaged. Customer complaints begin to repeat themselves; a large debtor keeps changing the payment date. Reconciliation differences that were once unusual become normal. The investor who said the money was coming next week begins to give vague answers. Sales are growing, but collections are slowing. The market is changing, but the team continues to build according to last year’s assumptions.

None of these signals alone may prove that disaster is coming. Together, however, they can reveal a direction.

Founders need the discipline to ask:

• If this pattern continues for six months, where will it take us?
• What belief are we relying on that has not yet been proved?
• Which person, customer or transaction has become a single point of failure?
• What decision would we make today if we were not emotionally attached to the current plan?
• What evidence would cause us to change our minds?

The quality of a founder’s foresight is partly determined by the quality of the questions they ask before events force an answer upon them.

You must see the danger without surrendering to it

The last serious challenge I faced took me about ten months to overcome. I had to sit with it. I had to keep doing what I knew to do, pursue the outcome we needed and remain mentally present while the solution took much longer than I wanted.

The business could literally have died. I do not use that expression dramatically. There are moments in a founder’s life when the existence of the company is genuinely at stake. Payroll still has to be met; customers still need to be served. Investors need honest communication. Employees look to the founder for direction, even when the founder is still working out what the direction should be.

Those periods teach you that courage is not the absence of an unpleasant reality. Courage is the ability to see the reality clearly without allowing it to paralyse your decisions.

Jim Collins calls this the Stockdale Paradox in Good to Great: you retain faith that you will prevail in the end while confronting the most brutal facts of your present reality. Both parts are necessary. Faith without facts becomes denial. Facts without faith can become despair.

During those ten months, I could not afford either mistake. I could not pretend the problem was smaller than it was, but I also could not conclude that the problem was the end of the business. I had to keep searching for a path.

Founders will probably face a moment like this once or twice in their journey—possibly more. You cannot prepare for every specific crisis, but you can develop the mental habit of separating “This route is failing” from “There is no route.” Those are not the same statement.

Perseverance means changing the method

People often misunderstand perseverance. They think it means repeating the same action for longer than everyone else.

Sometimes that is exactly how a company dies. If you keep approaching the same investor, selling the same proposition to the same customer, using the same failing channel or waiting for the same partner to rescue you, the passage of time does not transform repetition into strategy. As the familiar definition often attributed to Einstein warns, repeating the same behaviour while expecting a different result is not rational persistence.

Real perseverance protects the objective while changing the method. If direct sales are not working, you may need a distribution partner. If the original product is not gaining adoption, you may need to simplify it, reposition it or pivot. If equity capital is unavailable, you may need to grow through revenue, debt appropriate to the cash flows, consulting income or a strategic collaboration. If a particular person is delaying an answer your company needs, you must create alternatives.

Alternative one may fail. Alternative two may also fail. You try three, four and five—not carelessly, but intelligently, learning from each attempt. The objective is not to demonstrate how much suffering you can endure. The objective is to find what works.

Jeff Bezos has described Amazon’s approach as being stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details. That is one of the most useful principles a founder can adopt. Your conviction should attach itself to the problem and the future you are trying to create, not to every original assumption about how you will get there.

No person should become your only plan

A few years ago—not up to five years ago—someone promised a very large investment in my business. I believed the commitment and waited. I went back repeatedly. The process lasted for more than a year before I fully accepted that the investment was not coming.

That was a painful lesson, not only because the money did not arrive, but because of what waiting cost. While you are depending on one promise, you are often not pursuing enough alternatives. Your timetable becomes controlled by somebody who may not feel the urgency you feel.

I have learned not to depend on such promises again. This does not mean you should become cynical or assume that everyone is dishonest. Deals are delayed for legitimate reasons; an investor’s circumstances can change. Approvals can take longer than expected; but a founder must distinguish courtesy from dependency. You can respect a process without making it the only process capable of saving your company.

When someone promises an investment, partnership, licence, payment or introduction, decide in advance:

• What evidence will show that the commitment is progressing?
• What is the next concrete step, and who owns it?
• By what date must that step occur?
• How long can the company safely wait?
• Which alternatives will we pursue at the same time?

A promise is not cash; a term sheet is not cash. An enthusiastic meeting is not cash. Until the transaction is completed, manage the company as though completion remains uncertain.

The future of your business must never sit entirely inside another person’s inbox.

Give every important promise an expiry date

Founders lose time because hope does not naturally come with a deadline. Someone says, “We are interested,” and we convert interest into an expected outcome. We continue forecasting with money that has not arrived or a partnership that has not been signed.

A practical way to resist this is to place an internal expiry date on every consequential external promise.

The expiry date does not need to be hostile, and it does not mean you stop the conversation. It means that after a defined point, the promise no longer occupies the central position in your operating plan. You move it from “expected” to “possible,” and you allocate your attention accordingly.

This principle applies beyond fundraising. If a candidate continually delays accepting an offer, continue speaking with other candidates. If a supplier keeps postponing delivery, qualify another supplier. If a customer is interested but will not commit, keep selling. If a strategic partner cannot make a decision, redesign the plan so the company can proceed without them.

Optionality is one of a founder’s most valuable forms of leverage. The fewer alternatives you have, the more expensive every delay becomes.

Decision-making improves when you think in branches

Founders live in the future, but there is never only one future.

This is where scenario planning becomes useful. Instead of asking, “What will happen?” ask:

• What happens if the deal closes?
• What happens if it is delayed by six months?
• What happens if it never closes?

Then make the decisions that preserve the company across more than one scenario.

For example, if an investment arrives, you may hire faster and enter another market. If it is delayed, you may keep the team stable and focus on revenue. If it fails completely, you may reduce expenditure, sell a non-core service or secure a smaller bridge. The founder should know these branches before the bank balance forces a hurried decision.

Annie Duke makes a related argument in Thinking in Bets: a good decision cannot be judged only by whether the outcome happened to be good. Uncertainty means a thoughtful decision can still produce a bad result, while a reckless decision can occasionally succeed. The founder’s job is to improve the quality of the process: identify assumptions, estimate probabilities, consider alternatives and update as new information arrives.

This matters because founders can become superstitious. Something worked once, so we assume the decision was wise. Something failed once, so we abandon the principle entirely. Foresight improves when we separate the quality of our thinking from the luck contained in an outcome.

The founder must not become trapped inside today

Some founders are so overwhelmed by immediate problems that they lose the ability to think beyond them. Every day becomes a sequence of urgent messages, unpaid invoices, customer complaints and employee questions. The founder is busy, but the company is no longer being led towards anything.

Present problems deserve attention, especially when survival is at stake. Yet if every hour belongs to today, nobody is protecting the company’s tomorrow.

The founder must preserve time to think. Not perform thoughtfulness on social media, but actually think:

• What is changing in our market?
• Which technology will alter our customers’ expectations?
• What will become cheaper, faster or newly possible?
• Which regulation could change the economics of our business?
• What are customers already trying to do manually that will soon become a product?
• What capability must we start building now because it will take years to mature?

In Africa, foresight also requires understanding constraints that founders elsewhere may not experience in the same way. Currency can move dramatically. Regulation may change with limited notice. Infrastructure failures can become product requirements. Capital priced in dollars can place pressure on a company earning in naira, cedis, shillings or rand.

These realities are not reasons to think smaller; they are inputs into the design. The African founder who can anticipate them and build around them creates an advantage that may be difficult for an outsider to reproduce.

You can train foresight

Foresight improves with deliberate practice. A founder can develop it through a few habits.

First, write down important predictions. Do not merely say that a hire will be great or a market will grow. Record what you expect to happen, by when and why. Review the prediction later. Memory is too generous; it will quietly rewrite what you originally believed.

Second, identify the assumptions beneath major decisions. If the strategy works only if customer acquisition remains below a particular cost, state it. If the plan depends on regulatory approval by a particular date, state it. Hidden assumptions cannot be monitored.

Third, conduct pre-mortems. Imagine that the decision has failed twelve months from now and ask what most likely caused the failure. Gary Klein popularised this technique because imagining a failure that has already happened can make it easier for people to voice concerns they would otherwise suppress.

Fourth, create leading indicators. Revenue is often a result of earlier activity. Pipeline quality, product usage, customer response time, staff engagement and collection cycles may reveal direction sooner. Determine which signals provide an early warning in your business.

Fifth, seek disagreement; the founder’s conviction can become a distorting lens. Invite intelligent people to show you what you may be missing. The purpose is not to surrender the decision but to improve it.

Finally, preserve alternatives. Cash, relationships, additional suppliers, several candidates and more than one route to market all buy decision-making time. Optionality allows you to respond to the future instead of being crushed by it.

The future is built through present decisions

Founders live in the future because we must. Our companies begin as claims about what could exist. We ask employees, investors, customers and sometimes our families to believe in something that is not yet obvious.

But the future does not reward imagination by itself. It rewards the founder who converts imagination into a sequence of intelligent present decisions.

See further than the immediate problem. Notice weak signals. Tell yourself the truth early. Give promises deadlines. Build alternatives before you desperately need them. Change the method when the method is failing, but do not abandon a worthwhile objective merely because the first road became difficult.

I still believe founders must find a way. I no longer believe that finding a way means waiting forever for one person, one deal or one plan.

The founder’s advantage is not that they can predict everything. It is that they can imagine several possible futures, recognise which one is beginning to emerge and move before everyone else does.

Live in the future. But make the decision required today. —

References and further reading

• Paul Graham, How to Get Startup Ideas.
• Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.
• Jim Collins, Good to Great.
• Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.
• Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy.
• Gary Klein, “Performing a Project Premortem,” Harvard Business Review.
• Amazon, Shareholder Letters.