Gary Ong | August 24th, 2021

How do we balance vision with reality? Is it wrong to tell the story of possibility all the while knowing that the outcome goes through a road paved with broken glass? With so much risk, perhaps it is better to walk alone than to risk the well-being of others along the way.

As a scientist turned entrepreneur, I struggle daily with my desire to only state things that are ironclad reality to my employees, investors, mentors and friends. Vision contradicts that need: it is a reality that isn’t here yet.  Every day,  I do my best to tell the world just how risky things truly are in a startup, and just how low the probability of success truly is. I try to lay out every single challenge we are facing, show the world everything we are doing to address them, all the while acknowledging that we will still most likely fail. Yet, often, I feel like I am not doing a good job communicating the risk. It is as if there is an elephant in the room, and I am not doing a good job pointing it out. After all, if I did a good job, why would anyone join me in the first place?

So one day, I had the conversation with brutal honesty. I needed to know if people really understood what they were getting into. I had this conversation with all of my investors, all my employees, all my mentors, and all of my friends. The responses were the same: “I know. I’ve always known. You’ve made it very clear. I just believe it’s worth a shot.”

So there it was. Turns out, the big elephant I thought I was inadvertently hiding was right there in the room, and everyone saw it. The people weren’t there because they were tricked or deceived into being there. They were actually there for the elephant. They were there so that we can tame it together.

Image credit: Serhii Gkhaus