What Makes a Startup's Mission Appealing?
A significant component of one’s happiness is mission, which is a greater sense of purpose, beyond building a product or a business, making money and growing in one’s career. It will fill you with energy every morning when you start work.
Founders also look for missionaries and not mercenaries. So, from both the startup’s and the jobseeker’s side, mission is important.
What, concretely, does mission mean, though? I wanted to share what kind of mission appeals to me. If you disagree with some of the points, remove or change them as you want, to create your own sense of mission:
‣ Positive-sum.
‣ Ethical. For example, I turned down a startup that sells people’s personal information without their knowledge.
‣ The product is genuinely valuable (unlike Facebook) and adds value to the world. Adding value can be in the form of
‣ Providing opportunity to people who don’t have it, like a bootcamp that identifies would-be great engineers who may be poor or rural, and educates them at no upfront cost.
‣ Empowering people or small teams. As a first approximation, empowering means increasing the options someone has.
‣ Helping people achieve their passions.
‣ Reducing the cost of something important via technological innovation. e.g., Longshot Space is trying to launch at $10/kg as compared to $6000 for SpaceX.
‣ Ask yourself, Would I use this product?
‣ In addition to the product being useful, it’s better that it’s unique. SpinLaunch has a stronger sense of mission than WhatsApp, because the latter has many competitors: Telegram, Signal, iMessage, Slack…
‣ In addition to the product being genuinely valuable, the business should be sustainable, which means not cheating customers or mistreating team members:
Or giving away a product below cost, like BigBasket’s free 30-minute delivery, resulting in a ₹1500 crore loss. That’s a gimmick, not a sustainable business.
‣ Does the startup leverage my unique skill, which is building extremely high-quality technology? I wouldn’t work for BigBasket because they can get someone else to build their mediocre app. We should do what we’re uniquely qualified to do.
‣ Is it developed country-focused? This follows from the previous point — users in developed countries may tolerate a crash or a second-tier UX once, but if it happens again, they’ll uninstall your app and move on. By contrast, people in developing countries will restart the app, restart their phone, turn Wifi off and on, and so on. We’re used to and accept things being broken. Tht means a second-tier CTO can get the job done adequately, so it doesn’t leverage my unique skill.
‣ Is there a component of tech innovation?
Every company may not tick every box, but these are all good questions to ask when evaluating a company.
One way to determine whether a startup has a strong mission is to ask yourself, “Would the world be worse off if this startup disappeared?” If the answer is “not really”, then the startup doesn’t have a mission, and you should consider other options.