The difference between a crazy person and a visionary founder is consistency. A visionary describes the same core idea repeatedly, using different analogies but always the same underlying mental image. The speaker learned this watching Vitalik, who seemed unhinged at first but kept returning to the same vision.
I experienced this when I met Vitalik for the first time. I thought he was crazy. Biggest, biggest, biggest mistake of my life. I was thinking he was crazy, but I could just see in his eyes that he was seeing something that, you know, may or may not have actually been what the future would end up looking like, but he was definitely seeing something. And I realized the difference between crazy and visionary Is consistency, is that if someone is visionary, even if their vision may or may not be correct, but if they're visionary, they are seeing something. You see it in their eyes. They're seeing something that they're trying to describe, and they might be describing it in different ways. But there's this, when they actually are visionary, they actually have this felt sense of the thing. They're actually able to see it in their mind's eye every time. They're using an analogy every time they're trying to describe something. They're describing the same thing, even if it still seems abstract. And so that's probably the number one thing that I look for.
