Musical.ly

Great founders sell the 10-year vision AND ground it in the next 5 moves

Elman's rare-double trait of elite founders: they can paint a compelling 5-10 year picture of success and simultaneously ground it in the concrete next steps. He cites the Musical.ly (later TikTok) founder painting a vision of creativity for the world while explaining exactly which product flaws he'd fix next.

“they can paint that picture of the success in 5 or 10 years that sounds really, really compelling. So, they can hold that version of the future and sell it really well, but they can also ground it in, "And here's the next 5 things we're going to do and here's why." And I have met a lot of people that can do one of those things really, really well, but very few that can do both.”