Steve Blank’s Founder Genius clip “Creating a Reality Distortion Field” reminds us that the ability to create a vision that compels others to join you, invest in you and buy from you is an acquired skill, and one that is critically important to your company.

Few entrepreneurs have this skill to begin with. Most of the entrepreneurs Steve works with (many of them engineers) first have to develop the ability to get out of the building and have conversations with prospective customers. What makes these conversations so uncomfortable?

“The difference between an introvert and an extrovert is whether they look at their shoes or yours. We teach them how to make eye contact. Repetition and physically getting out of the building, talking to customers, gets founders into a space where they come back and say, ‘This was the best skill I learned’,” Steve says.

Once you’ve developed the ability to talk with customers and honed your business idea, you can begin to craft a really compelling vision that can entice co-founders, employees, investors and others to drop everything and join you. 

This vision doesn’t focus on your product’s features, but encapsulates your impact and objective.

“Envision how the world will be different five years after people started using your product. Tell me. Explain to me why it’s a logical conclusion. Quickly show me that it’s possible,” says Steve.

Steve’s advice for people who are afraid of getting out of the building:

“It’s seductive to hire a VP of sales and outsource customer discovery. But the founder can do something that no proxy, no VP and no hire can do. He or she can ask a series of questions that can inform decisions to pivot or iterate right there on the spot,” Steve says. “Only the founders can do that. In the beginning of a startup you want the founders out of the building leading a customer develop team with the founders having the authoring to take customer feedback and create iterations and pivots in real time. It’s a major distinction between a salesperson whose job is to execute and a founder, whose job is to learn and discover.”