Idea · carried by 1 source
Mission as a Distraction
An overemphasis on mission can distract founders from what actually matters: building a product that customers will pay for. Mission belongs at the bottom of the priority list, not the top — and the venture capital ecosystem has trained founders to inflate its importance.
Where it comes from
William Hockey, pushing back against mission-driven company building, in highlights/william-hockey-bet-on-yourself (~46:00): “I think mission can actually be a little bit distracting... I think it's on a list of five things most important, I think it's probably on the bottom end of that five list.”
How it works
- Who cares about mission?: “You need a mission, right? Otherwise people just go work at hedge funds.” But the customer “doesn't give a flying fuck about what your mission is. They just care about does this product create value for me and am I willing to pay for it? That's it.”
- The VC distortion: “When you're pitching investors like investors want to feel like they are part of something. They want to feel that 'Man, I'm not just recycling pension fund money into other capitalists.'” So “we've taught people that 'Man, you need to focus on the millennia journey.'”
- Drinking your own Kool-Aid: “If you start to like drink your own Kool-Aid too much, you kind of forget that.”
- The real goal: “What do you want to do? You want to convince somebody to buy your product and you deliver them enough of an experience that they can't build it themselves and they're going to pay a lot of their hard-earned money to you. That's the goal.”
Mission is a recruitment and investor-marketing tool, not a product strategy. If you confuse the two, you build products that feel meaningful internally but deliver insufficient value to customers. The customer's mission is their own — your job is to help them achieve it.