The ambitious goal changes what you build

There's this moment that happens when founders set their annual goals. Someone throws out something big—10x revenue, launch in 5 cities, rebuild the entire platform. And then someone else in the room does the responsible thing. They talk about being realistic. Setting achievable targets. Not setting themselves up for failure.

I've watched this play out multiple times now. The ambitious goal gets negotiated down to something "reasonable." And you know what happens? They hit the reasonable goal and nothing changes. They don't 10x anything. They don't transform the business. They just do what they were probably going to do anyway, except now they feel good about hitting a target.

The thing nobody says out loud: failing at an ambitious goal doesn't mean you fail completely. You can miss your target by 80% and still end up somewhere you never would've reached with a "realistic" plan.

Say you're doing $2M in revenue. You set a goal to hit $20M next year. Everyone tells you that's insane. They're probably right—you won't hit $20M. But here's what actually happens when you organize everything around trying to hit $20M:

You rebuild your sales process because the current one won't scale to $20M. You hire differently because you need people who can operate at $20M scale. You kill products that won't matter at $20M. You say no to partnerships that would be distracting at $20M.

End of year, you hit $8M. You "failed" by 60%. You're also doing 4x revenue with an infrastructure that can actually scale.

The person who set a "realistic" goal of $4M? They hit it. They also still have the same sales process, the same team structure, the same product sprawl. They did 2x revenue but they're fighting the same problems they had at $2M.

This is what people miss. The ambitious goal changes what you build and who you become. The realistic goal just measures what you were already capable of.

I keep seeing this pattern at the 10-person stage. The founder knows they need to hire senior people. But they tell themselves: "We can't afford someone who's operated at scale. Let's hire people who can get us to Series A, then we'll upgrade."

That's putting a ceiling on it. So they hire people who are good enough for the next 18 months. Those people make decisions designed for the next 18 months. They build systems that work for the next 18 months. When Series A hits, everything those people built needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

The founder who hired for the ambitious version—the person who's already scaled a company to 100 people—gets different infrastructure. That person builds systems thinking about what breaks at scale. They hire thinking about who you need at 50 people. They make decisions assuming you're going to be way bigger than you are.

You might not get to 100 people. You might top out at 40. But you'll have systems built by someone who knows what good looks like at scale. The other founder is at 40 people with systems built by someone who'd never seen past 15.

Once you've organized around an ambitious goal, you don't fall all the way back to where you started. The new sales process doesn't disappear if you miss your target. The senior hire doesn't quit because you hit $8M instead of $20M. The products you killed stay dead.

This is the ratchet effect. Ambitious goals move the floor up even when you miss the ceiling.

I watched one founder set a goal to ship a complete platform rebuild in 6 months. Everyone knew it was impossible. Took them 14 months. But here's what happened in month 7 when they realized they wouldn't hit it: they didn't stop. They'd already committed to the architecture. Already rebuilt half the infrastructure. Already trained the team on the new system.

They "failed" by 8 months. They also shipped something that would've taken 3 years if they'd set a "realistic" 2-year timeline. The ambition compressed decision-making. No time for committee discussions about every technical choice. No time for perfect documentation. Just ship the next piece.

The realistic timeline would've meant more planning meetings. More consensus-building. More "let's make sure we think through every edge case." All the things that slow down shipping without improving the outcome.

This isn't a case for delusional thinking. There's a version of ambitious goals that destroys companies.

It happens when the goal demands a different strategy but you keep executing the old one, just faster. You're doing $2M selling to SMBs with a 6-month sales cycle. You set a goal for $20M but don't change the ICP, don't change the sales motion, don't change the pricing. You just tell the team to close more deals.

That's not ambitious. That's just bad math.

The ambitious goal has to unlock a different approach. It has to make you ask: "If we actually wanted to hit this, what would we have to do differently?" If the answer is "work harder at what we're already doing," you don't have an ambitious goal. You have a fantasy.

Real ambitious goals force you to change what you're building, who you're hiring, and what you're saying no to. They make current constraints irrelevant because you can't hit the goal with current constraints. You have to build new ones.

Last year I watched a founder set a goal to get to profitability in Q1. They were burning $400K/month. It was aggressive but possible—cut costs by 40%, grow revenue by 30%, you get there.

They missed it by two quarters. Hit profitability in Q3 instead.

But by Q1 they'd already made the cuts. Already shifted from R&D to revenue-generating features. Already changed the team structure to reduce management overhead. All the stuff they delayed for 18 months because it was painful.

The ambitious timeline meant they couldn't postpone the hard decisions. Couldn't wait for people to self-select out. Couldn't gradually shift the strategy. Had to do it now.

They "failed" the Q1 target. They also cut their burn by 60% and added $150K/month in revenue. If they'd set a "realistic" goal of Q4 profitability, they'd have moved slower on the cuts, spent more time discussing alternatives, given people more transition time. They might've hit Q4. Or they might've run out of money in Q3.