Ask HN: The Right Now Company vs The Innovative Future

I am sometimes told by successful entrepreneurs that to be super successful, you need to have a vision for the future, and to spend your time morphing the current world into that vision, small steps at a time.

But then I see a lot of successful startups that seem to just build things that somebody has a need to pay for to solve some problem today. The company does not at least appear to be born out of some great vision to change the world.

An immediate example of this is twitter vs (most) applications built on top of twitter.

What are your thoughts on this?