In startup land, there’s two schools of thought for envisioning a product. The Thielian approach advocates “calling your shot”; positing a brave new world and positioning oneself as the courageous faction driving towards it. The Graham-ian approach, in contrast, says, “call your customers”; get in front of real people, listen to their problems, and translate the synthesis into a coherent value proposition.

These stances are more yin-yang than true, binary opponents. Calling one’s shot work best when grounded in a problem space, and calling one’s customers works best when you have more than an incremental solution to offer.

The tragedy is that the most common case is to do neither. To not offer a bold, alluring vision of the future nor to deeply engage on a continual basis with people as they are, where they are.