Describing the product you want is not the same as having it
Oracle was built on imagining a product before it existed. In 1990 the same habit, applied to sales figures, nearly sank the company.
Think of it as you want it, not as it is!
In 1977 Larry Ellison and two colleagues, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, started a small software company in California. They had read a paper published by the IBM researcher Edgar Codd describing a relational database, a way of storing data in tables that could be queried flexibly. IBM was slow to turn it into a product. Ellison’s company built one and called its first release version 2, reasoning that customers would be wary of a version 1. The company became Oracle, and the relational database became the standard way businesses store their data.
The line is widely credited to Ellison, though where he first said it is unclear. It fits how Oracle began. The founders imagined the product as it should be and sold that picture to customers before the software fully matched it. Early releases were buggy, and customers often bought on the promise of what the next version would do. Picturing things as they wanted them let a tiny company compete for the business of large ones.
The same habit has a cost. In 1990 Oracle announced that it had overstated its revenue, in part because salespeople had booked deals before they were final. The company reported its first loss, its share price fell sharply, and it came close to running out of cash. Ellison brought in experienced managers to impose financial controls, and the company recovered. The lesson was that thinking of something as you want it works for products and plans, and fails badly for accounts.
That is the useful boundary. Vision belongs in design and strategy, where imagining a better state is the point. It does not belong in the numbers used to run the business, where the only useful picture is the accurate one. Founders need both habits, and they are hard to hold in one head.
Ellison’s own companies have kept to this pattern: bold claims about products, followed eventually by careful management of the finances. The exclamation mark in the line is typical of him. It is worth remembering that Oracle survived its early optimism partly because other people in the company insisted on seeing things as they were.