I’ve been thinking about this topic a while, but these thoughts are only semi-formed.

It’s been said recently that there is shortage of truly revolutionary ideas out there.  And I think it’s true.  Most companies I see are working on pretty narrow problems, not that many are really wildly ambitious.

As an early stage investor, I want to see wildly ambitious companies.  It makes the risk/reward calculus easier when the reward is very very big.  It also is what makes this a satisfying vocation for me.

Granted, there are exceptions.  Air BnB, Square, and Uber are all pretty bold companies.  IMHO, I’m also working on incubating a company that is pretty darn ambitious as well.

But then again, I think back to some of the most ambitious companies out there, and many happened by accident.  For example:

• Ebay was a little experiment at enabling online trading of collectibles.
• Groupon was a major restart after a fundraising platform ThePoint didn’t take off. 
• Twitter was a side project that rose from the ashes of Odeo.

There are many others.  I’m not just saying that great companies are the result of pivots.  For example, I’d say Paypal was a very ambitious company.  It was the result of a pivot, but each original company was also a big swing in its own right.  

But unlike Paypal, many pillar companies recently seem to have emerged without a very audacious objective in mind in the beginning.  The entrepreneur instead followed their users and uncovered something huge.  This raises a few questions for me:

• How are these entrepreneurs able to scale as these companies go from neat side projects to something much bigger and more unpredictable?
• Are these stories really just stories of luck?
• Does the fascination with lean startup practices lead folks away from pursuing really ambitious projects?  But then again, does it matter when you can stumble upon something remarkable anyway?
• How important is it to have a really big, coherent vision of the future vs. just starting out solving a simple and well defined problem?

Would love to hear people’s thoughts.  It’s too late for me to do more thinking on my own 🙂