Starting Fluxcapacity (now Occipital) has been a learning process.  So far, the most striking revelation was becoming aware of the fact that that I care immensely about the type of company that Occipital becomes.
Among other things, I need it to be the type of company that has a distant vision which stretches the imagination.

This type of company and its products should interact with customers emotionally as well as practically.  Solve problems, but trigger something deeper along the way.

So far, I think that creating this type of company probably isn’t fundamentally different from most other types, but I do think it may shift priorities.

Oblong Industries is an example of a company that has a distant vision, and since their ideas served as the basis for the gestural computers in Minority Report, I think they certainly fit the imagination-stretching criteria.   A few weeks back, I asked Kwin, one of Oblong’s founders, whether he any thoughts on what it takes to build this type of company.

He came back with several observations, which I’ll summarize:

Getting backing from people who understand the vision for the company is crucial.  Finding the right hires is a challenge; for it to work right, this needs to be their dream job.  If you do hire correctly, imagination is abundant and diffuse, and not a limiting factor.  Finding a balance between practical milestones and your goals on the other side of the universe is something that you will focus a lot of energy on, even obsess over.  Even if you can find the right people, and the right balance, coordination overhead keeps the team size smaller than it might be.  The major arcs remain in place, but the roadmap will probably go all over the place.

Each of these observations warrants further thought, but the first two are about the people.  The investors and the employees.  For the employees, Kwin said it should be their “dream job, ” which sounds parallel to how Randy Pausch felt about working for Disney, perhaps the company with the highest imagination quotient of all.

At U of M, long before Vikas and I started working together, I remember him remarking in a short speech on how the greatest thing about being part of Michigan’s engineering honor society was that he knew he could  share his most far-fetched ideas with anyone in the group, and actually have a sensible conversation on the matter.  Until recently, I didn’t really know why that particular statement stuck in my mind, but now I think it makes perfect sense:  cultivating imagination is among the most important things to me.

It’s too early to say whether Occipital will be able to chase distant imaginative goals, but we will keep this objective close to the chest, and hold it with as much esteem as any of our other measures of success.