Perhaps you're mis-remembering and rather rely on PR narratives and more erroneously you're conflating intentions and mission. When Larry and Sergey worked on

Perhaps you're mis-remembering and rather rely on PR narratives and more erroneously you're conflating intentions and mission. When Larry and Sergey worked on their PhD thesis of an algorithm to rank pages relative to each other, went to a party, and received a $100k check in the garage, was the pitch really "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" or did they arrive to that later? Likewise, when Travis rolled off from Scour to connecting for hire cars that sit idle, again was the intention already "make transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone" or did they arrive at that later? And Mark in his dorm room figuring out how to scrape and upload his classmates photos to a PHP website, he was delightful with glee that he has achieved his mission of "making the world more open and connected" or did he and others figure that out when he moved out here to Palo Alto? These things took off, they got more money, the money brought more help, more help created an organization. Mission statements, like code, is refactored over and over then massaged by marketers and publicists and recruiters until it hits you.