In 2021, while TravelPerk was still recovering from a pandemic that had taken our core product to zero, I wrote a document imagining the company acquiring Booking.com for $50 billion.
I should be clear. This wasn't a plan. It wasn't a board deck. It was a fictional future history, written as if a journalist were looking back on how TravelPerk became the largest travel company in the world. It traced the path: doubling down on business customers after COVID, building innovation and inventory partnerships simultaneously, acquiring HotelBeds, then Expedia, then Booking.com. It described TravelPerk's "7-star service in what used to be a 1-star industry" as if it were already famous. It read like a Wikipedia article from 2030.
Some people thought it was delusional. (Fair enough. We'd just come through a year where our revenue had basically disappeared.) But that wasn't the point. The point was strategic clarity.
When you write the ending first, something interesting happens. You stop debating whether an idea is too ambitious and start asking what would need to be true for it to happen. The $50bn Booking.com acquisition was absurd as a goal. But as a thought experiment, it forced specific questions. What kind of inventory partnerships would TravelPerk need? What would the flywheel look like? Where would acquisition-led growth compound fastest? Those questions led directly to a corporate development strategy I wrote the same year: acquire $1bn in travel budget by end of 2022 through direct TMC acquisitions, indirect supplier migrations, and opportunistic tech acquisitions. That strategy was not absurd. It was operational, costed, staffed.
The fictional ending made the real strategy sharper. Not because anyone believed we'd buy Booking.com. But because imagining that future clarified which bets mattered now.
I used to think vision-setting was about inspiration. Getting people excited. Painting a picture of what "winning" looks like so the team feels motivated. I've now seen it from enough angles to know that's only half of it (and maybe not even the important half). The real value of a vision isn't emotional. It's analytical. A good vision is a constraint. It rules things out. If the ending is "we are the largest travel company in the world," then you stop investing in things that don't contribute to that outcome. The vision does the prioritisation for you.
At readywhen.ai, we've done the same thing, at a very different scale. We wrote out what success looks like in specific, concrete terms before we built anything. Not "we'll be a leading AI platform" (which means nothing). Something precise enough that you could write the fictional future history and it would read as plausible. What does the product do, for whom, and why does it become indispensable? When you answer those questions as if they've already been answered, the current-quarter decisions get much easier.
The trap is that most founders write their vision as an aspiration. Something to aim at. The discipline is writing it as a fact and then working backwards. What would need to be true for this to have already happened? Who would we need to have hired? Which market would we need to have won? Which bets would have needed to pay off?
The fictional future history forces honesty. You can't handwave in a narrative that's written in the past tense. "TravelPerk acquired HotelBeds in 2023" either makes sense given everything before it in the story, or it doesn't. The past tense is a ruthless editor.
I'll leave you with Peter Thiel: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"
Ours was that a travel company could survive a pandemic and come out acquiring the incumbents. Write the ending where that's true. Then build backwards.