Recently I've spent a lot of time drawing a long-term picture of the future and making decisions about direction. A story has finally come together, and I've returned to the world of product — thinking about how to execute. I've also made a deeper commitment to where I'm placing my bet.
In the process, I had the chance to discuss some of what I'd been thinking with a group of startup founders. The topic was: "What kind of future are you planting seeds in, and on what time horizon?"
"Live in the future, and build what's missing."
"Live in the future, and build what's missing." — Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail)
I believe this is one of the core truths of aiming for invention.
Rather than improving the present, the idea is to vividly imagine a future that will eventually become ordinary — and use your product to close the gap between that future and today.
The approach goes like this:
- Describe a highly concrete version of the future
- Precisely measure the gap between that future and the present
- Take concrete actions to close the gap (while withstanding the pressure of everything around you)
Companies and products that use this "thinking by jumping to the future" to create "today's new normal" are powerful.
And the further into the future a company dares to look, the more its product stops being merely "better" than competitors and becomes "different" — something in another dimension entirely. A 2x difference can be compared; a 10x difference (an order of magnitude) cannot.
The first example that comes to mind for me is Amazon, which declared "The Everything Store" as its vision and is actually making it happen.
But Japan has its share of companies that have "jumped forward" too. Take the world's strongest convenience store chain: 7-Eleven. Consider what makes them unusual:
A few of 7-Eleven's "industry firsts":
- Japan's first convenience store, in an era dominated by large supermarkets
- Installed POS systems in every store; first in the world to use POS data for marketing
- Created their own bank — in 2001, of all years
- Built their own dedicated factories (to develop Seven Premium and Seven Gold in-house)
When 7-Eleven opened its first store in Koto, Tokyo in 1974, "general supermarkets" ruled the day. You could find everything there; families spent their weekends there. Small-scale convenience stores were seen as inferior, watered-down versions of supermarkets — everyone said they'd never catch on.
Fast-forward to today: general supermarkets have been unbundled by specialty stores. "Anytime, anywhere, high quality" has been delivered by 7-Eleven, which has continued to update the final form of retail.
7-Eleven is dramatically different even among convenience stores. Compare average daily sales per store:
- 7-Eleven Japan: 6.53 million yen
- Lawson: 547,000 yen
- FamilyMart: 506,000 yen
This untouchable execution came from "thinking by jumping forward." Forty-four years ago, founder Suzuki planted seeds set to bloom 50–100 years in the future, and today 7-Eleven occupies a unique position that no one can touch.
Things planted for the long term are detached from the present, which gives them their grandeur. But realizing them requires proportionate resources. Building trust to gather those resources, designing something concrete, and making consistent progress — management has a responsibility to "keep the dream from becoming a hallucination."
By contrast, when you try to plant for the short term, you inevitably want near-term operating cash flow. You start worrying about this year's P&L. And that makes it genuinely hard to build a large future, at least in my experience. There are surely people who balance both well, but I could only focus on one thing.
The reason startups dilute their equity to raise money, I believe, is equivalent to a message: "ignore operating cash flow to some degree and go build the future." (At least, that's the philosophy under which 10X holds its investors' money.)
We went all the way to starting a company to do this. "Challenging a future that might actually transform society" — isn't that what we actually wanted to do when we decided to start up?
I want to build "the infrastructure of the future." I want to look down from that future, call the present broken, and use my own hands to close the gap. Don't you?
I have my own "this is what's broken about today" and "this is what the future should look like," and that's why I started this company. Releasing Tabery as a product was my entry point. But honestly, when I launched, I didn't yet have a clear design for how to reach that far future. In Japan, where large incumbents dominate, trying to do big things in a big way looks almost completely blocked. Only recently have I finally been able to map a path through.
Uncertainty is still high, but I've decided to bet on this position and go deeper. I'm going all in on building the future I believe in.
