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> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission? > Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have

> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission? > Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large. I find this one interesting. When Google started, there were many incumbent search engines. Their mission was to provide better results than what existed, i.e. improve on an existing product. Uber's "mission" was to get privileged people with smart phones and disposable income a sexy/cool ride home from the bar. Facebook was a social networking site targeted at college students...what was it's mission? To allow people to see what that cute person in their Psych class was up to this weekend? Snapchat...the clear and important mission to allow for safely sending risqué pictures? While I believe Sam's belief that they WANT to work with companies with clear important missions, that doesn't seem to be a/the deciding factor in becoming "very large", or attracting great people. If anything, it seems like the "spaghetti at the wall" approach is what happens - some startups gain momentum, and then it's the high growth trajectory that attracts a ton of talent.

dharmon 10y ago
In fairness, he does state that this is just about his boredom. At the end of the day, its up to him and the YC stakeholders to decide how much his personal boredom is worth in terms of returns and missing The Next Big Thing. The danger is in forgetting that all the big companies with lofty mission statements ("Make the world more open and connected", "Organize the world's data") did not start out that way at all. They didn't develop them until well after the point that some place like YC would be investing. In fact, there might be an inverse correlation: companies that start out with huge, inspirational missions before they even have a user / customer are more likely to end up failures. I could think of many reasons why.
shoyer 10y ago
Google's mission has been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" since day one [1]. You're confusing mission with strategy. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/laszlo-bock-on-google-mission-statement-2015-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/laszlo-bock-on-google-mission...
- pvg 10y ago
  Not only that but the actual improvement was so substantial it might have well been a different product - a web search engine that actually works.
deleted 10y ago
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hxta98596 10y ago
All these companies have mission statements. Whether a potential hire, potential investor or anyone else chooses to believe or be cynical about that mission is something else. Seems like there's always a spectrum among employees from the kool-aid drinkers to momentum-seeking remoras just hitching a ride. Still, even when an employee is skeptical or cynical about the company's stated mission initially; the more time someone works somewhere have you not seen man's search for meaning kick in...an employee often will create their own mission why they are there, real or not.
nostrademons 10y ago
Usually the product comes before the mission. Google's product was a search engine with better results than existed, but their mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". That mission statement was a key part in them getting key hires. Uber's mission is "Transportation as reliable as running water." Facebook's mission is "Make the world more open and transparent." The product is about what the company does today, the mission is about what the company will do in the future. It's usually not a good idea to come up with the mission statement before you have a viable product, but it's critical for bringing on board employees, executives, and investors.
- twelvechairs 10y ago
  If these were their real missions most of these companies they would be doing things very differently. Facebook transparent? Not a chance. Uber reliable? Not with surge pricing etc
  - kristianc 10y ago
    The companies as they are today may not be achieving their mission - that doesn't mean that they won't in the future. Facebook has succeeded in making the world a more open and transparent place - people have the ability to share information that matters to them and have people around the world find out about it. There are fewer places around the world for those in power to hide information away now. That's different to whether Facebook as a company is transparent. Uber likewise may or may not be reliable now - surge pricing only ever increases the price of an Uber to the same as the price as a black cab where I live, but it's pretty clear that Uber's ambitions of self driving cars do not include surge pricing.
    - mememachine 10y ago
      Theres no discernable progress towards their mission. Call it what it is, PR puff.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
colordrops 10y ago
It's less about mission and more about culture/ethics. A good mission will engender a culture that people will be attracted to, but even if the mission is not super sexy, with say search for instance, Google's culture and ethics attracted people.
austenallred 10y ago
Perhaps the issue is you not understanding the companies' missions. What you're describing is products, which represent a manifestation of one piece of the mission, and are a building block that helps construct a world in which the mission is possible. Google, for example, is (and was) on a mission to do much more than build a really sweet search engine. Their goal from the beginning has been (though now refined): "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That's a little bit easier to get behind, isn't it? Uber isn't about "getting privileged people with smart phones and disposable income a sexy/cool ride home from the bar;" its mission statement is, "make transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone." Facebook? From the beginning Zuck stated his goal was to "Make the world more open and connected." Snapchat, according to Spiegel, is about making it easy to "communicate with the full range of human emotion." It takes years and insane amounts of effort from large numbers of people to build even one tiny piece of each of these missions (which makes sense - they're enormous missions). But working for a very mission-driven company, I can attest that it's the mission that keeps me going, even when I'm only one tiny spoke in one of the many products that will contribute a tiny piece to making the mission eventually more achievable. It seems you are viewing these products in a very negative light, and in doing so you're missing the forest for the trees. I would guess that all of the companies above will be wildly successful, and will have a wide range of products, all dedicated to achieving their stated mission. Rome wasn't built in a day.
- mbesto 10y ago
  > (though now refined) That's exactly the point. Google didn't start with that mission, it had to be refined. And Google, meaning Larry and Sergey working on algo's prior to actually starting a commercial entity. The parent's point is that many of the most successful tech investments have come from businesses that are generally dismissed as toys in their initial phases. YC invests in companies at their earliest stage, so it seems odd that the mission statement needs to be so well refined. This invariably means there's a disconnect between what pg has traditionally said and what sama is dictating now. > Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest. http://paulgraham.com/organic.html http://paulgraham.com/organic.html Anyway, I think the reason that sama says this is because it is absolutely essentially for a company to get big, but that doesn't mean they need to have it right away. Also, let's be fair, determining something that is clear and important is very subjective.
biztos 10y ago
> the clear and important mission to allow for safely sending risqué pictures? If you measure missions by how much the potential audience wants them to succeed, I'd say this is pretty huge. That doesn't necessarily make it a very compelling thing to work on, but "safer sexting" is way more important than "ads on everything."
edpichler 10y ago
May you didn't get the point (or maybe I didn't) of what Sam was meaning. I think at the very beginning companies don't know what is really the mission, they are experimenting. But these companies just start to grow when they realize what is their mission.
d0m 10y ago
Keep in mind that google's mission evolved over the years.. but at the beginning, they still had a clear mission of making it easy to search the web (compared to the portals that forced you to their bullshit content).
sebleon 10y ago
Ha, classic straw man argument
- optimusclimb 10y ago
  I wasn't really arguing with sama - just making some commentary on a small part of a larger document.
throwaway934261 10y ago
> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission? > Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large. Says the man whose first big exit was Loopt, a drain-circling "Grindr for flip-phones" that only got acqui-hired because a Sequoia Capital board member who'd invested in Loopt pulled strings to get Green Dot to buy it and cover his investment. Harsh, I know, but hardly inaccurate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687816
choxi 10y ago
I think this is an important point that's worth addressing. It does seem like most successful startups stumble onto their idea, and their mission statement is usually a post-rationalization [1]. The question of "Does it come down to luck or is there a repeatable process?" is critical to YC's success. I think PG and Sam have made great contributions to discovering a repeatable process, but because they're so prestigious now and attract the best startup candidates they can basically just filter for the ones that already have traction. I'm a huge fan of what Sam's been doing with YC, but this is what I miss the most about PG. PG didn't have any brand to benefit from, so it was critically important that he understand the physics behind successful startups so that he could deterministically understand which ones would be successful or not before they were already obviously successful. YC doesn't have to do that anymore, they can just choose the startups that apply and already have customers and revenue because they get so many applications. My gut tells me that the next step in developing a repeatable process for successful startups is a better understanding of markets. If you look at all the startups you mentioned (not Google, but Uber, Facebook, Snapchat), they all applied a relatively simple technology to a new market that the founders had a unique perspective on. Uber had unique access to the SF population that's constantly frustrated by transportation options but quickly embraces new tech, Facebook tapped into the market of college students that most VCs and entrepreneurs overlooked because they weren't in college, and Snapchat did the same with an even younger market. I'll add Slack to the list as well: they built an equivalent product to HipChat and Campfire (which were created years before Slack) but targeted the market of non-developers. 1. It's hard to find supporting evidence, but I have never seen or read a mission statement from a company before they were already massively successful.

dharmon 10y ago

In fairness, he does state that this is just about his boredom. At the end of the day, its up to him and the YC stakeholders to decide how much his personal boredom is worth in terms of returns and missing The Next Big Thing. The danger is in forgetting that all the big companies with lofty mission statements ("Make the world more open and connected", "Organize the world's data") did not start out that way at all. They didn't develop them until well after the point that some place like YC would be investing. In fact, there might be an inverse correlation: companies that start out with huge, inspirational missions before they even have a user / customer are more likely to end up failures. I could think of many reasons why.

shoyer 10y ago

Google's mission has been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" since day one [1]. You're confusing mission with strategy. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/laszlo-bock-on-google-mission-statement-2015-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/laszlo-bock-on-google-mission...

pvg 10y ago
Not only that but the actual improvement was so substantial it might have well been a different product - a web search engine that actually works.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hxta98596 10y ago

All these companies have mission statements. Whether a potential hire, potential investor or anyone else chooses to believe or be cynical about that mission is something else. Seems like there's always a spectrum among employees from the kool-aid drinkers to momentum-seeking remoras just hitching a ride. Still, even when an employee is skeptical or cynical about the company's stated mission initially; the more time someone works somewhere have you not seen man's search for meaning kick in...an employee often will create their own mission why they are there, real or not.

nostrademons 10y ago

Usually the product comes before the mission. Google's product was a search engine with better results than existed, but their mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". That mission statement was a key part in them getting key hires. Uber's mission is "Transportation as reliable as running water." Facebook's mission is "Make the world more open and transparent." The product is about what the company does today, the mission is about what the company will do in the future. It's usually not a good idea to come up with the mission statement before you have a viable product, but it's critical for bringing on board employees, executives, and investors.

twelvechairs 10y ago
If these were their real missions most of these companies they would be doing things very differently. Facebook transparent? Not a chance. Uber reliable? Not with surge pricing etc
- kristianc 10y ago
  The companies as they are today may not be achieving their mission - that doesn't mean that they won't in the future. Facebook has succeeded in making the world a more open and transparent place - people have the ability to share information that matters to them and have people around the world find out about it. There are fewer places around the world for those in power to hide information away now. That's different to whether Facebook as a company is transparent. Uber likewise may or may not be reliable now - surge pricing only ever increases the price of an Uber to the same as the price as a black cab where I live, but it's pretty clear that Uber's ambitions of self driving cars do not include surge pricing.
  - mememachine 10y ago
    Theres no discernable progress towards their mission. Call it what it is, PR puff.
- nostrademons 10y ago

colordrops 10y ago

It's less about mission and more about culture/ethics. A good mission will engender a culture that people will be attracted to, but even if the mission is not super sexy, with say search for instance, Google's culture and ethics attracted people.

austenallred 10y ago

Perhaps the issue is you not understanding the companies' missions. What you're describing is products, which represent a manifestation of one piece of the mission, and are a building block that helps construct a world in which the mission is possible. Google, for example, is (and was) on a mission to do much more than build a really sweet search engine. Their goal from the beginning has been (though now refined): "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That's a little bit easier to get behind, isn't it? Uber isn't about "getting privileged people with smart phones and disposable income a sexy/cool ride home from the bar;" its mission statement is, "make transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone." Facebook? From the beginning Zuck stated his goal was to "Make the world more open and connected." Snapchat, according to Spiegel, is about making it easy to "communicate with the full range of human emotion." It takes years and insane amounts of effort from large numbers of people to build even one tiny piece of each of these missions (which makes sense - they're enormous missions). But working for a very mission-driven company, I can attest that it's the mission that keeps me going, even when I'm only one tiny spoke in one of the many products that will contribute a tiny piece to making the mission eventually more achievable. It seems you are viewing these products in a very negative light, and in doing so you're missing the forest for the trees. I would guess that all of the companies above will be wildly successful, and will have a wide range of products, all dedicated to achieving their stated mission. Rome wasn't built in a day.

mbesto 10y ago
> (though now refined) That's exactly the point. Google didn't start with that mission, it had to be refined. And Google, meaning Larry and Sergey working on algo's prior to actually starting a commercial entity. The parent's point is that many of the most successful tech investments have come from businesses that are generally dismissed as toys in their initial phases. YC invests in companies at their earliest stage, so it seems odd that the mission statement needs to be so well refined. This invariably means there's a disconnect between what pg has traditionally said and what sama is dictating now. > Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest. http://paulgraham.com/organic.html http://paulgraham.com/organic.html Anyway, I think the reason that sama says this is because it is absolutely essentially for a company to get big, but that doesn't mean they need to have it right away. Also, let's be fair, determining something that is clear and important is very subjective.

biztos 10y ago

> the clear and important mission to allow for safely sending risqué pictures? If you measure missions by how much the potential audience wants them to succeed, I'd say this is pretty huge. That doesn't necessarily make it a very compelling thing to work on, but "safer sexting" is way more important than "ads on everything."

edpichler 10y ago

May you didn't get the point (or maybe I didn't) of what Sam was meaning. I think at the very beginning companies don't know what is really the mission, they are experimenting. But these companies just start to grow when they realize what is their mission.

d0m 10y ago

Keep in mind that google's mission evolved over the years.. but at the beginning, they still had a clear mission of making it easy to search the web (compared to the portals that forced you to their bullshit content).

sebleon 10y ago

Ha, classic straw man argument

optimusclimb 10y ago
I wasn't really arguing with sama - just making some commentary on a small part of a larger document.

throwaway934261 10y ago

choxi 10y ago

I think this is an important point that's worth addressing. It does seem like most successful startups stumble onto their idea, and their mission statement is usually a post-rationalization [1]. The question of "Does it come down to luck or is there a repeatable process?" is critical to YC's success. I think PG and Sam have made great contributions to discovering a repeatable process, but because they're so prestigious now and attract the best startup candidates they can basically just filter for the ones that already have traction. I'm a huge fan of what Sam's been doing with YC, but this is what I miss the most about PG. PG didn't have any brand to benefit from, so it was critically important that he understand the physics behind successful startups so that he could deterministically understand which ones would be successful or not before they were already obviously successful. YC doesn't have to do that anymore, they can just choose the startups that apply and already have customers and revenue because they get so many applications. My gut tells me that the next step in developing a repeatable process for successful startups is a better understanding of markets. If you look at all the startups you mentioned (not Google, but Uber, Facebook, Snapchat), they all applied a relatively simple technology to a new market that the founders had a unique perspective on. Uber had unique access to the SF population that's constantly frustrated by transportation options but quickly embraces new tech, Facebook tapped into the market of college students that most VCs and entrepreneurs overlooked because they weren't in college, and Snapchat did the same with an even younger market. I'll add Slack to the list as well: they built an equivalent product to HipChat and Campfire (which were created years before Slack) but targeted the market of non-developers. 1. It's hard to find supporting evidence, but I have never seen or read a mission statement from a company before they were already massively successful.