Planning Time Horizons

Especially essential when fundraising, startup leaders must be agile planners who can envision a whole array of plan options in progressive time horizons.

Imagine startup strategic planning like a landscape photograph, with a:

• Foreground – The foreground is the ground directly in front of the viewer and tends to be in the sharpest focus.
  
  
• Middleground – The middle ground is the ground between the foreground and the background and tends to be less clearly focused while still being discernable.
  
  
• Background – The background is in the distance and can be either a distant mountain or the sky. Details in the background are often indistinct.

There are relationships between the fore, middle, and backgrounds, with the closer elements leading into the distance along visual leading lines. These elements create depth and structure in the scene.

These concepts have parallels in how a startup leader needs to conceive of their plans, especially as they lay out compelling stories for the use of proceeds while fundraising. Instead of the different grounds found in a landscape photo, a planner will be focused on what elements (aka milestones) are in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term of the future envisioned. Like a landscape photo, elements nearer in time will be easier to see, with more detail visible. Elements further away will be progressively less in focus. Key images that need to be mapped into your planning landscape need to be placed in relationship to each other, with the relationships between them made clear.

Using the analogy of composing a compelling photograph, here are some tips for designing an appealing building-your-startup plans picture to attract investors:

• Move Around to Consider Different Possible Perspectives:  A photographer trying to find the best image will often shift around to see how different angles coalesce, whether that is scanning horizontally or climbing up or crouching down to get a better angle to find the best shot. Similarly, in startup planning, be sure to “move” around to consider different potential directions to go, different mountains to climb, and different risks to tackle. For example, one direction might offer a smoother road while another might be a more tangled hike. Consider what risks to prioritize first, what longer lead-time tasks need to be tackled, and relationships between different milestones. Fleshing out the details of the different possibilities allows the startup to identify critical paths – and determine if there is some flexibility that should not be missed.
  
  
• Identify the Most Important Design Elements and Connect Them: Like a well-conceived photograph, the picture must define the scale of the mountains that different amounts of funding will enable you to climb. Bigger, more jagged mountains are riskier than nearer-term hills, but climbing an enormous mountain can mean creating a larger competitive advantage faster. However, there is likely an increase in risk as well.
  
  
• Identify milestones along your potential pathways. The size of a milestone often depends on how far your travel plan takes you. Consider your ultimate destination in the background, and then identify the peaks between here and there. Consider the paths between them. If you have only limited resources, your milestones may resemble smaller boulders in the fore and middle ground, rather than mountains in the distance. Milestones can vary in scale, but they should show a progression in the direction you are headed.
  
  
• Zoom In and Out to Consider Different Framing:  In some ways, planning for fundraising is like using a zoom lens to shift back and forth between the near and far visions. Often, this feels like the planning one does while seeking to formulate what can be accomplished by raising different amounts of money. It is not just a linear calculation to plan for a $1M, $5M, or $15M raise, as investors typically will not want to sign up for more than two years of runway at a time. As the startup leader considers different round structuring approaches, understanding various investors’ preferred investment “bite sizes” might guide what size round (frame) you should target and, therefore, how far to zoom in or out your round size and cooresponding milestones to accomplish with those funds.

The most important point I want to emphasize is that composing a compelling photograph (vision) takes skill and practice. Similarly, designing a vision for how to build a startup over time demands insight, creativity, and ruthless focus. To be good at it, a startup leader needs to become adept at thinking about various time horizons, constantly cycling between them, and examining the different angles that might yield a better design for weighing various elements and trading off multiple risks.