Dear Leaders,

Jensen Huang was on stage at GTC explaining NVIDIA’s strategy when an analyst interrupted: “But what exactly ARE you? A gaming company? A data center company? An AI company?”

Jensen smiled. “Yes.”

The analyst persisted: “But which one is your primary…“

“Yes.“

NVIDIA’s market cap that day: $2.4 trillion. Turns out confusion pays pretty well.

We’re obsessed with clarity. Every MBA program teaches you to craft a crisp mission statement. Every consultant wants to “clarify your value proposition.” Every investor demands you explain your company in one sentence.

Here’s the problem: the biggest opportunities today can’t be explained in one sentence until after they work.

When Andy Rubin was building Android, he told investors it was an operating system for cameras. When it failed, he pivoted to phones. Except he didn’t pivot, he was always building a universal OS. He just didn’t know how to explain it yet. Google bought Android for $50 million. Today it powers 3 billion devices.

Facebook started as “hot or not for Harvard.” Amazon was “Earth’s biggest bookstore.” Netflix mailed DVDs.

I sat on the board of a startup that spent 2019 perfecting their “AI for enterprise sales” pitch. Crystal clear positioning. Focused product roadmap. Tight messaging.

Then COVID hit. Suddenly their computer vision tech was perfect for contactless experiences. But they’d optimized so hard for sales teams that they couldn’t see it. A competitor, who’d been flailing around in “something something AI”, grabbed the opportunity. They’re worth $2 billion now.

Clarity is great if you’ve bet right. But early clarity is just a bet with conviction. And conviction without flexibility is how you become Blockbuster explaining why streaming isn’t your business model.

Amazon Web Services started because Amazon had extra server capacity. Nobody knew what it was. “Infrastructure as a service?” “Cloud computing?” Even Bezos called it “primitives”. Deliberately vague.

That ambiguity was worth hundreds of billions. While Oracle and IBM were clarifying their enterprise strategies, AWS was becoming whatever customers needed it to be. By the time competitors understood the market, Amazon had already won it.

Marc Andreessen once said: “The best founders can’t explain what they’re building because they’re building something that doesn’t exist yet. Language hasn’t caught up.”

Google spent a decade being unable to explain how search made money. “We’ll figure out the business model later” isn’t a strategy. Except when it is. That confusion gave them time to discover AdWords, which now prints $200 billion annually.

Here’s something board members never admit: half the time when a CEO presents their strategy, we don’t fully get it. But some of us have learned that’s often a good sign.

Reed Hastings couldn’t explain why Netflix was producing original content when they were a distribution platform. The board was confused. Wall Street was confused. But Hastings saw something that didn’t have words yet: content and distribution would merge.

Tesla’s master plan made no sense. Start with an expensive sports car to fund a cheaper sedan to fund an even cheaper car? Every automotive expert said it was backwards. You start cheap and move upmarket. But Musk wasn’t building a car company. He was building a battery company that happened to make cars. We just didn’t have that category yet.

The most astute leaders I know are embracing strategic ambiguity. Not the political kind where you avoid taking positions. The generative kind where you leave room for opportunity.

Satya Nadella’s “cloud first, mobile first” strategy for Microsoft made no sense. How can two things both be first? Tech pundits mocked it. But that confusion gave Microsoft permission to abandon Windows Phone while going all-in on Azure. The ambiguity was the strategy.

When Patrick Collison describes Stripe, he uses different words every time. Payment infrastructure. Economic infrastructure. “Increasing the GDP of the internet.” This looks like messaging inconsistency, but it’s strategic flexibility. The ambiguity lets Stripe be whatever the next opportunity requires.

Every startup advisor preaches focus. “Do one thing well.” It’s good advice…for execution. But terrible advice for exploration.

Spotify can’t decide if it’s a music platform, a podcast network, or an audio company. Critics call this “lack of focus.” But that confusion is precisely what lets them capture opportunities that don’t exist yet.

I know a robotics company that refuses to pick a vertical. Manufacturing? Logistics? Healthcare? Their investors are frustrated. But every narrow-focused robotics company I know is dead or dying. The confused one just raised at $4 billion.

Here’s what productive confusion costs: you burn money exploring dead ends. You frustrate employees who want clear direction. You sound incoherent in interviews. But here’s what premature clarity costs: everything you didn’t know you could be.

WeWork had perfect clarity. “We’re revolutionizing office space.” They optimized everything around that story. Meanwhile, Airbnb stayed confused about whether they were a hospitality company, a marketplace, or a community platform. That confusion let them see opportunities WeWork couldn’t imagine.

The trick isn’t being confused forever. It’s being confused productively. Here’s the difference:

Productive confusion has hypotheses, not just hope. You’re running experiments, and not just wandering. You have conviction about capabilities, just not applications.

Here’s the hardest part: you still have to recruit, raise money, and ship products while confused. You can’t tell your team “we’re not sure what we’re building.” You can’t tell investors “we’ll know it when we see it.”

So you tell stories that are true but incomplete. You paint visions that are compelling but flexible. And you set directions that are clear enough to execute but vague enough to evolve.

Bob Iger’s autobiography reveals that Disney’s streaming strategy was basically “something something digital future” for three years. But internally, he was specific about capabilities they were building, just not how they’d combine. That’s productive confusion at its finest.

We’re living through the opening act of an AI revolution that makes the internet look like a sound check. Anyone who tells you they know exactly how it plays out is selling something.

How will we work when AI can do 80% of knowledge tasks? How will we learn when answers are free but questions are priceless? How will we create when machines can create too? Better yet, how will we value companies when their entire business model might be automated away next Tuesday?

Nobody knows. And that’s the point.

The world still pretends to reward clarity. Analysts still demand it, boards still request it, and investors still price it in. But look closer: the trillion-dollar companies are the confused ones. The ones who can’t explain what they are. The ones whose strategies sound like poetry instead of PowerPoints.

Not confused about execution: you still need to ship products, hit numbers, and serve customers. But confused about boundaries, definitions, and destinations.

Next time someone demands you explain your strategy in one sentence, remember: if you can explain it perfectly, it’s probably already obsolete. The future isn’t unclear because we’re not smart enough to see it. It’s unclear because it hasn’t been invented yet.

And the inventors are the ones who look confused right now.

Stay confused, stay curious, and stay open to opportunities that don’t fit in anyone’s strategic plan.

That’s how you build something worth a trillion dollars while analysts are still asking what exactly you are.

The answer, of course, is “Yes.“

Onward,

Hamza