Greetings and welcome to our fifth and final session for getting started with technology startups. In this session, we'll talk about some of the core building blocks of technology startups. These include vision. What do you see in the ideal outcome of your product or service? Mission, how are you going to accomplish your vision? How will you actually deliver value to your customers? Strategy, what are the techniques, the methods, the structures that you'll deliver your value to customers, and business model, what is the core element or structure that frames the operating mechanisms of your business? We'll be talking about these core business elements that will bring us to a close in Session 1 of getting started with technology startups. Let's go ahead and jump right in. What we'd like to do in this session is understand the core meaning behind vision and mission. What are their purpose, and how might we design the vision and mission statement for our new venture? We also want to describe how vision and mission drive business strategy and understand how strategy impacts business model. Finally, we'll begin to unpack the definition of a business model to really get a core understanding of how these building blocks come together to formulate the structure or the approach of our new business enterprise. Let's go ahead and jump in. In Session 1, first, we'll dig into vision and mission. What is the vision statement? Well, it really captures a greater sense of meaning or motivation. It's a way of harnessing your inspiration if you will and it answers the question, big why, what is your big why? What really inspires you to do the things that you want to do or to accomplish the goals that you seek to accomplish? One of the things to notice about a vision statement that's very characteristic is it has a strong emotional appeal. If you remember, early on, we talked about the impact statement and you were asked to construct an impact statement. Impact statement be in a very general sense of what is it that I really care about the most. What really motivates and inspires me? What makes me want to just jump out of bed in the morning and go to it. Well, if we can harness that, the energy of that or the concept of that and bring that into manifestation as the idea or the ideation, if you will, behind our new business and the emotional appeal as the energy of that impact is what really the inspiration. That's, it answers the question why? The way we think about a vision statement is, as the word implies, vision, what do we see? Imagine the ideal uptake of your proposed product or service. What would that look like? What would that feel like? Can you harness that? Can you somehow brain that with a very short set of words, a simple statement? It really encapsulates or brings together a sense of purpose and ideally it would stand alone. It doesn't require an explanation, and it doesn't even need to be associated with a particular product or service. It unlists the end orients stakeholders and what that means is the ecosystem of people involved with the business. This could include certainly your staff, founders, your customers, but it also would give the general public a sense of orientation about what is the high-level purpose or motivation, the inspiration behind the business that you're creating. You want it to be really simple and have a strong felt sense. The reader is not cognitively interpreting a meaning as much as they are emotionally feeling a sensation behind your words. This is a real distinction between a vision and a mission, which we'll get to here in a moment. But again, the vision statement is the ideal uptake of your product or service and how you see that how you visualize that manifesting. Now, on a high level, if we think about the overall structural elements of a business, there is goals, there's objectives, there's strategy tactics, there's programs. You can even get underneath of programs and say there are projects. There are many different management frameworks, if you will, to give you an idea or to suggest how these different components come together. What I'm suggesting here is that vision and mission encapsulate all of the operating dynamics of our business. Everything objective and subjective is encapsulated within the vision. The mission tells us how we accomplish our vision, how is it manifest. Then goals are set up to tell us how we're doing accomplishing our mission and objectives are the metrics in those goals. Strategy is about how we go about addressing or accomplishing our objectives. The tactics are the step-by-step activities and clusters of those tactics we may think of as programs that are strategically aligned. It's a little bit of a play on words here, but visually, I hope that you understand the idea here is that vision and mission first and foremost, encapsulate all of the operating dynamics of the business. You would like for the reader to be able to read the vision and really feel inspired and to want to be a part of that. It has that emotional appeals such that it doesn't require me to think about or logically determine whether this product or service does something for me, it appeals to something that I care about. Then the mission is really addressing how we enact the vision. Generally is a little bit longer, but it summarizes and communicates that process of manifesting our vision. It answers the question, the big what behind the big why. Similar to vision, the mission is also very concise and easily understood by the stakeholders. You want to be able to read it and just get it. What you do not want is someone to ask for an explanation of what your mission or your vision means. If you find that when people read your vision and mission they sometimes gets stumbled or not, I'm not sure what that means or can you explain this a little more? Well, you might need to retool it and take another look. It should be a very simple, easy to understand, easy to relate to. It can serve to orient and to focus on activities within the enterprise and actually create value. That is a guiding sense of purpose and a sense of overarching guideline, if you will, or a handrail for stakeholders and especially founders and people within the company to be oriented and to understand how they work together to create value for customers. Can influence strategy and rationale for resources that are needed to accomplish and realize your vision. The mission should also be periodically reviewed and updated. It's not something that's static. You'll start somewhere, but in a sense, even your vision to an extent, there is a continuous feedback loop. It's a dynamic process. It's not linear. Although we are approaching our building blocks in a linear fashion, what I'm suggesting is that there's a continuous feedback loop on each element, back to each previous element, and all the way back to the beginning, even to the impact so that there's more or less a consistent awareness that yes, here we tweak, update, adjust new information, new insight, slightly tweak, adjust so that we accommodate new information so we're able to adjust to changing conditions. It's dynamic over time. We'll track our results and we'll determine how well we've accomplished our mission. Ideally, in a broader sense, we would like our personal and professional vision and mission to align. Now what does that mean? Well, in a sense, if you think about it, when you go back to that impact statement, that is really a very personal approach to understanding the core motivation and inspiration to create a business. You would like that part of yourself to align with the professional aspect or ideally to truly enjoy and be inspired with how you spend your time, and the things you do with your day, and how you interact with people. To what extent can you align your personal and professional vision and mission doesn't mean that the same thing, it means that they are mutually supportive. Each, in a sense, supports the other and provides for the full recognition and realization of those. That brings us to a close of Video 1 of six for Session 5. I'll see you back shortly for Video 2.
