Building Cortex: Why Your Grand Vision Can Wait

Having a revolutionary vision doesn’t mean you need to sell it on day one. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Cortex CEO Zack Rosenberg explained why restraining your ambitions can accelerate market adoption.

During Cortex’s early days, the team faced a crucial decision about how to present their video AI technology to enterprises. “We knew if we wanted to be successful, we had to make or convince people that we’re only making a 5% change. We’re actually making a 500% change,” Zack explains.

To illustrate why grand visions can hinder early success, Zack points to Uber: “Could you imagine walking into the very first investor meeting and saying, ‘hey, we’re going to create self-driving trucks, but first we have to do these 19 things?’ That meeting would have been very short.”

The key insight? “You certainly have a big vision, but you can’t necessarily sell that big vision on day one.” Instead, Cortex focused on immediate, solvable problems in video monetization.

This approach proved crucial when launching their product in January 2021. Despite early interest from major publishers, progress stalled. “We thought we were running in the right direction… Then by the end of ’21, weren’t that much further ahead,” Zack recalls.

The breakthrough came from repositioning rather than reinvention. “Positioning is probably the most important skill of any entrepreneur,” Zack notes. “You can have the same product, same marketing, same everything, but the way that you position it could change the market you go after.”

This strategy requires decisive leadership. “Startups don’t work on indecisiveness,” Zack emphasizes. “It’s okay to sit there for a day or two or three and usually even a little bit longer than that, but you got to pick the direction and you got to have conviction once you do.”

Today, Cortex is tackling the massive challenge of video understanding. As Zack notes, “If you were to sit here and try to watch every video on the Internet today, it would take you 17,000 years to do back to back.” But they didn’t lead with this moonshot vision.

Their long-term vision remains ambitious: “We have the opportunity right now to bring value to content and what you’re watching and what you’re interested in a way that it’s been done in search for 20 years, but we never had the capacity to do it in video.”

The lesson for founders? Your ultimate vision can guide internal decision-making without dominating your market narrative. By focusing on immediate, solvable problems while building toward larger ambitions, you can drive adoption without overwhelming potential customers.