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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.

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

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.

Theres no discernable progress towards their mission.

Call it what it is, PR puff.

So, there's this weird effect where basically every major company has a gigantic fundamental hypocrisy in their mission statement:

Google's is "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and yet - if you leak anything about them as an employee, you are insta-fired. If you try to figure out any sense of organization about their product portfolio, good luck. If you try to scrape any of their results or content, you will be banned quite quickly.

Facebook's is "make the world a more open & transparent place", and yet they have done more than any company since AOL to turn the web into a series of walled gardens. Plus Mark Zuckerburg bought the 4 houses adjacent to his so that neighbors couldn't look onto his property, and walks around with a 24/7 security team.

Uber's is "make transportation as reliable as running water", but their goal is for people to give up their own cars - which they can use any time, any where, for zero marginal cost - to be at the mercy of Uber's service.

Palantir's is "Palantir Technologies is a mission-driven company, and a core component of that mission is protecting our fundamental rights to privacy and civil liberties", and they sell to the CIA so they can spy on you.

At the same time, these companies also do many things that actually are in accord with their mission statements.

I think that you can reconcile this by realizing that the fundamental imperative for every company is continued existence. Those who fail at this are replaced by those who succeed. The mission statement is a tool to ensure continued existence, because it serves to align & recruit employees with similar values, without which there would be no organization. But when there are other imperatives that are necessary for the company's continued existence, even when they contradict the mission statement, the company's existence takes priority. Hence Google is very strict about their proprietary information, even though their mission is to make all information universally accessible; Facebook wants all content on Facebook, even though they claim to be about making everything open & transparent; Uber wants to make transportation reliable & easy, as long as it's on Uber; and Palantir wants to protect civil liberties only so long as it involves buying Palantir software.

> Uber's is "make transportation as reliable as running > water", but their goal is for people to give up their own > cars - which they can use any time, any where, for zero > marginal cost - to be at the mercy of Uber's service.

I'm not sure what car you're driving, but in my experience there is a significant marginal cost. I no longer own a car, exclusively using public transit + Lyft, because I don't want to deal with maintenance, paying for parking, gas, insurance, etc.

Maintenance, insurance, etc. are largely fixed costs: you have to pay the same for them regardless of how much you use the car. (Pity for me, I've got an 8 year old car with < 30k miles on it.)

Parking in the suburbs is subsidized by business owners & the city itself - you can usually park for free, and the price of it is reflected in land values.

Gas is the only marginal cost for suburban driving, and I can basically guarantee that Uber costs more than gas does. The marginal cost of driving across Silicon Valley, in gas, is under a dollar.

I saw Zuckerberg walking in Palo Alto with wife, child and dog and no security visible just over a year ago. If he has 24/7 security, either they're very discreet or it started recently.

Probably a very discreet security detail. Not all of them need to be man or have the same haircut.

http://fortune.com/2016/04/28/protect-mark-zuckerberg/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mark-zuckerberg/121590...

I would bet on them being discreet. Good security is very good at making people unaware that security is present. I recall showing my relatives around the Googleplex when I worked there, having my brother-in-law comment on the seeming lack of security for such a high-value target, and then telling him "No, they're there - if you try to walk off with a laptop or take pictures of something you're not supposed to, they'll come running."

I don't have a link handy, but it has been documented that Zuckerberg outspends all other CEOs on personal safety by a huge margin (something like x10).

Consider that Steve Jobs famously chided his friend Larry Ellison for having 24/7 bodyguards.

> Palantir's is "Palantir Technologies is a mission-driven company, and a core component of that mission is protecting our fundamental rights to privacy and civil liberties", and they sell to the CIA so they can spy on you.

The CIA doesn't spy on Americans.

Is there a standard term for the tension that arises from people depending on the existence of the things that they get paid to mitigate? I've heard people mention the potential conflict of interest where anyone who gets paid to do something would lose their livelihood if that thing stopped being necessary, so in a sense we all have reasons not to want to solve things too well or too completely.

That's not exactly what you're talking about in each case, but it could be relevant.

I agree about Facebook, but surge pricing is exactly what makes Uber reliable.

- Facebook's mission is "Make the world more open and transparent."

That was not their original founding mission. It was

"Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges [Harvard only][2004]"

In 2006 that mission was changed to include other universities and colleges.

Which is a long way from their current stated mission. In other words, mission statements evolve - and the founding mission is seldom the final mission for many companies.

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.

> (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

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.

Focus is on the word "other," here. Paul's been consistent about the need for both something that immediately solves a real problem, even if it looks like a toy to _other_ people, and a big picture key idea.

Yes. I'll add that Google's initial goal of a search engine that is actually helpful (not just algorithmically, but without clutter and without paid-placement) was plenty inspiring... especially for great developers. And, being more concrete than their general abstract corporate mission statement, it was actually more inspiring.

I want to add the mechanism of success-due-to-toy: incumbents dismiss you, not as incompetent, but as irrelevant to them. You're not stealing their customers, because you're meeting a different need, and are worse at what their customers want - further, the incubents couldn't fight you even if they wanted to, because they can't afford to desert their customers.

Then, over time, you improve til you are good enough for their customers - while stll meeting those other needs. The exodus begins.

I think you may be mixing up the state of the company and/or its mission at the time of founding/early investment with their state at the present time.

> 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."

I don't think that was from the get go.

> 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.

Yes and no. I most certainly don't view Google in a negative light. I'll admit I view Facebook as largely existing to promote rampant consumerism. Snapchat...don't even know where to begin.

Nonetheless - the point of my comment, and why I found sama's statement interesting - was the assertion that lacking a large, important mission statement (or big hairy audacious goal, if you will) is an impediment to growth (or ability to "become very large".) When you look at the winners - they usually do have a lofty, all encompassing mission statement - but it would seem not to have been that way at inception. If anything, I thought the preaching in the startup world has been about finding a niche, an angle someone hasn't seen, make something people want...and then expand from there.

A final thought - even Y Combinator itself seems an example of this (at least in my eyes.) What started out as a fund/startup incubator is now truly trying to tackle and invest in very audacious things (such as Universal Health Care.) It's able to do that now that it has become a successful, large brand in and of itself.

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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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=3687816

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.

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.

> 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."

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.

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.

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).

Ha, classic straw man argument

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