Setting aside the nonsense missions, I find it surprisingly useful from a self-determination perspective when working with a strongly motivated team: - On one

Setting aside the nonsense missions, I find it surprisingly useful from a self-determination perspective when working with a strongly motivated team: - On one hand we say '100Xing investigations'. This is customer centric, focusing on the process they go through. - Our team & history are deep tech - GPUs, program synthesis & language technology, graph AI, and large-scale visualization. This is not customer centric, but does give us differentiating ingredients for achieving that. Why this matters is we try to have loose management with declarative assignments. It's one thing for folks to be senior on their craft and know the multiple paths to achieve something... and another for them to know how to make tricky trade-offs that align with the company. The technology investments show where spending a bit of extra time helps under-the-hood, and the customer problem focus is even better for that. Likewise, when someone veers off, it's a lot easier for a peer to gut check. Our early days were too tech-centric in mission, and that led some things astray. There are other reasons too, such as helping team cultural assignment. Overall, having something good here does simplify a lot. If startups are a team of people navigating their way to a scalable business, getting the mission right is a natural aspect of figuring out what value you are bringing to what customers.