Future optimizations are hallucinations until they come true

Uber’s original investor pitch deck was put together long before they became a hundred billion dollar company.

The document has been widely publicized since the company’s ascent into startup superstardom. And the content of it is pretty bare bones. Less than thirty slides, mostly financially focused, and minimal design.

But at the end of the deck, there’s one section that’s particular inspiring. The page called future optimizations.

Garett, the company founder, was casting a vision about the untapped potential of his ride sharing brand. He listed potential offerings like premium on demand services, improved geolocation technology, incentives for using electric cars, and so on.

Today, more than a decade later, many of those features have either been abandoned or evolved into something else.

But that’s not the point. Because when you’re defining a new category and launching a new brand, you have to be a visionary. You need original ideas about what the future could be like. You need to see what something could become, long before it actually happens.

Now, as any entrepreneur will tell you, predicting the behavior of technology, even a few years from now, is almost impossible. But that doesn’t make the visonearing process any less worthwhile. Imagining and sharing future optimizations is a useful exercise.

Einstein once observed that a mind once stretched by new thoughts can never regain its original shape, and this is precisely what he was talking about. What vision of the future are you casting?

Prolific started out as a simple software as a service offering. Users paid $12/month for unlimited access to over three hundred personal creativity management tools, as well as articles and daily emails explaining how to use them. Pretty bare bones.

But during development of our product, one of my favorite exercises was brainstorming a master list of future optimizations. It fired me up every time, stretching my brain into new possibilities. You can read all of these ideas in my original pitch deck for this software, but here’s a recap for your reference. Future optimizations include:

Data collection and productization, clinical research, consulting and training programs, user progress reports, physical product lines, enterprise licensing opportunities, user notification systems, certification system, professional communities, white labeling offerings, artificial intelligence integrations, browser extensions, gamification levels, and even an application marketplace.

Wow, just reading my list gives me the chills. Visioning the untapped potential of my brand was an excellent use of my time. And as you can see, some of those ideas have been realized since the original inception of this product.

Whatever you’re launching, make sure you’re communicating a compelling vision and passion of what could be. Tell people what’s wrong with the world that you want to make right.

Sure, all of your future optimizations are basically hallucinations until they come true. But in the early stages of any big project, we all take our confidence where we can get it.

How will you stretch your thoughts so your mind never returns to its original shape?