InVision CEO Clark Valberg has been put through his paces on the Twenty-Minute VC, a regular startup podcast hosted by Harry Stebbing.
Valberg, described by Stebbing as “a total rockstar”, explained in the interview why he thinks true leadership is like writing, how to be self-aware and what he described as the “fundamental false premise of entrepreneurship”.
Essentially, Valberg said, few people actually wake up one day saying “I want to become an entrepreneur” at any point. More typically, they’re trying to solve a problem, which is exactly what happened with InVision.
“Everything that people think about being an entrepreneur, mostly I hear it from young people, has a false premise: when did you ‘want to become an entrepreneur?’ I never said that. I had an idea about something exciting, but I never said ‘I want to be an entrepreneur’,” he said.
Valberg said the problem InVision was looking to solve as to help the company, and they’d had no thought at the time of commercialising their solution.
Instead of having to go through all “the gatekeepers of project management”, they had asked themselves if there was a way they could simply start designing and being iterative about the process.
“A developer wanted to turn it into a SaaS product, like 10 years ago: at the time I had no idea what a SaaS product was. But should we make it into a product that other people could use? I said: ‘Sure.’ We hoped that maybe other agencies worked like we did and wanted to focus on UX first, and had this ‘design-first’ desire,” Valberg said.
For more from InVision’s Valberg on the importance of vision, ideas around enlightenment and entrepreneurship, remote teams, and how angel investing has changed his operating mentality, listen to the entire podcast – the actual interview starts a few minutes in, at 3:30.
