It’s a coordination game…
Let’s imagine you want to found an organisation, project, or something else. The world is currently in an equilibrium where the thing does not exist.
There’s some better equilibrium where the project exists and is flourishing – it has funding, a great team, efficient systems, people see a bright future for it, and it’s doing work that’s really valuable. In between, there are a bunch of not-flourishing states – maybe some of them are also equilibria (but much less valuable ones). Others will devolve back into the ‘not existing’ state.
Your goal is to shift into the great equilibria. To do this, you need to boost talent, funding, expectations etc. in a coordinated way.
How do you do this?
Have a really strong vision
Iterate on this vision as you talk to the funders and potential hires
Build momentum before the ‘jump’ where you found the project
Have good relationships with funders and potential hires
Do small hops before the big jump
Coordinate the jump: (accurately) let funders know that top talent is interested, and let top talent know that funders are interested. To do this with integrity, you need to kind of gradually shift up interest with each of these groups.
… but you should play it with integrity
I think that this sort of dynamic is (a part of) what caused Theranos to become a fraud. They were trying to do this coordinated jump to a world with great talent working on an important problem. The jump failed, but they kept claiming that it was succeeding.
They had a cool vision! But rather than selling the potential, they lied (even from early on) about how close they were to that vision (and they probably deceived themselves towards believing that lie.) Then they tried to cover up the lies and pretend that they’d made the jump when they hadn’t.
You can have a bold vision and also be clear that you haven’t reached it yet (and that you might fail and never reach it): this is often enough to get great support for your project.