Key Takeaways
- 10-year plans assume a stable environment that almost never exists.
- The 18-month planning horizon is long enough for meaningful goals and short enough to update based on what you learn.
- Vision should be long-term. Plans should be medium-term. Actions should be near-term.
Saim Abbasi has both made and abandoned 10-year plans multiple times. The abandonment was not failure. It was the plans being replaced by better information about what was actually possible and what was actually worth pursuing. The experience convinced him that long-term planning, while valuable as a directional exercise, is counterproductive when treated as a binding commitment.
The Horizon Mismatch
Ten years is long enough for the business environment, the technology landscape, and the competitive dynamics of any specific market to change in ways that are genuinely not predictable. A 10-year plan created in 2014 could not have incorporated the impact of the smartphone ecosystem maturation, the rise of remote work, or the emergence of large language models. The plan's assumptions about the environment would have been wrong in important ways by year four, meaningless by year seven.
The 18-Month Planning Framework
The planning horizon that Saim uses is 18 months. Long enough to make meaningful investments and set meaningful targets. Short enough to update based on what is actually happening in the market. The 18-month plan is connected to a longer directional vision, a sense of what the company should be and what the founder wants to have built, but the specific milestones and resource allocations are planned only 18 months out and reviewed every six months.
Preserving Optionality
The advantage of shorter planning horizons is not just accuracy. It is optionality preservation. A 10-year plan that commits resources and attention to a specific direction makes it psychologically and sometimes contractually difficult to pursue the better opportunity that appeared in year two. The 18-month plan is designed to be replaced when it should be, which keeps the company responsive to opportunity rather than committed to a direction that was set before the best information arrived.
"The 10-year vision is useful. The 10-year plan is a fiction that takes time to maintain and rarely improves decisions."