Invest in Visionaries? Yeah but No... by Joseph Blass, CEO

A Google search of ‘invest in visionaries’, will result in a plethora of websites of Private Equity and Venture Capital firms with marketing phrases such as ‘ we look for founders with vision’ or ‘we back visionaries investing in the future’.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes a visionary as follows: A visionary is someone with a strong vision of the future. Since such visions aren't always accurate, a visionary's ideas may either work brilliantly or fail miserably. 

I wonder whether when you get a call from such a PE/ VC firm, the focus of the conversation is your vision for the future, or is it your historical metrics, which require a calculator rather than vision. Let’s assume the answer is the latter, the focus of the conversation is the historical stuff. That is fair enough, because what is the point of discussing the unknown future with someone who has no proven track record?

Now I wonder what the second call is like. It has been established that you have an excellent proven track record, so much so, that the PE/VC want to invest in you, but to secure your business, it is no longer about taking an investment to do more of the same, but taking the investment to innovate. You want to be like the companies that took their experience in traveller cheques and evolved into issuing credit cards, or from book sellers to online retail giants. Of course, you don’t have historical metrics for these new and exciting visions – after all, it is in the future. I wonder how many of those firms who claim to invest in visionaries will actually entertain this further conversation.

Joseph’s observation resonates because it exposes a familiar contradiction. Vision is celebrated in language, but validated through numbers. Metrics feel safe; they describe what has already happened. Vision, by contrast, asks people to engage with what hasn’t.

The distinction between the first call and the second call is telling. Early conversations are rightly grounded in proof. Track record matters. But once credibility is established, the purpose of investment changes. Capital isn’t meant to simply protect the status quo... it’s meant to enable what comes next.

That’s where discomfort often creeps in.

True innovation rarely arrives with neat historical data. The companies we admire for reinventing themselves did so without certainty, without metrics to guarantee success. At the moment of decision, belief mattered as much as evidence.

This is what makes the phrase “we invest in visionaries” so easy to say and so difficult to practice. Supporting vision means engaging seriously with ideas that can’t yet be measured…and accepting that some will fail.

Joseph’s closing question lingers because it doesn’t accuse, it invites reflection. Not all capital is designed for uncertainty, and not all relationships create the conditions for it. Vision requires trust, patience, and a shared appetite for the unknown.

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether investors back visionaries, but what it truly takes to do so when the future can’t yet be modelled.

It’s a tension we’re very conscious of at Ezekia. We spend a lot of time listening to what works today, while also making space to explore what comes next, even when the data isn’t complete.

Because building for the future rarely starts with certainty. It starts with trust, curiosity and the willingness to invest in ideas before they’re fully proven.