What does it mean to be mission-driven in 2026?

0:05Today on Great Chat, we're talking about startup missions. Do they still matter in this current era of tech? And how do they differ from the prior generation of tech companies and the rhetoric of the early 2000s and 2010s? I'm Helen, and I'm joined by Angela and Ashley. Great Chat is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking loved by over 300 ,000 entrepreneurs. We use Mercury to run this podcast and love recommending it to other founders and fund managers. It's free to get started. Try it for yourself. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. hey crew hello i'm in your city welcome to sf yes welcome to sunny sf ashley i feel like every time i come here the weather is amazing and i did live in san francisco for a decade so i know that is not always the case but i it was awful this weekend it was truly awful this weekend so it is you brought the sunshine well it's beautiful now and i just have to assume it's always always beautiful in San Francisco.

1:02I was walking around like sort of the Castro Dolores Park area yesterday afternoon after getting in and I like wandered into an open house and I was shocked, shocked when the price was less than a million. Did you put in an offer? I did not put in an offer. But I was in my head. I was, you know, it was like this very cute two bedroom. It was like a thousand square feet. It wasn't big, but it had this beautiful garden. And in my head, I just see all these tweets and these headlines. And I assume like there is nothing you can buy for a hundred or a million dollars, but, but either there is, or this is priced low so that there's a bidding war.

1:43And I'm going to read on Twitter tomorrow that it went for 3 million, but I did. I feel like I found a unicorn. Well, I think it's very tale of two cities with regard to single family homes and condos in SF. And so you likely, if you likely stumbled into a condo, But single family homes, because we have such a fixed supply, I think that's really subject to the wild volatility of whatever the currently the AI gods will bestow upon the market. But yeah, in my neighborhood, when I go for walks, it's like there are all these cute homes that are pretty much just like abandoned. Like, oh, it must be a family home that no kids wanted to take over or whatever.

2:20And now all of a sudden there's work being done on them and there's porta potties, you know, outside of a different home. So I feel like somewhere, somehow, some people got the memo that right now would be a good time to sell this property that probably needed too much work for them to bother with previously. But, you know, this is a boom and bust town. And right now we're definitely in boom. And that means next comes bust. It doesn't... Just when is the question. Yeah. So I think that's probably resulting in a lot of like quick contractor work. It's so nice for me because our neighborhood has increased in like bougie coffee shops and matcha like hi-fi record stores by like a factor in the past year.

3:05And there's all these youths that are in line on the weekend. So I feel young and hip and like my neighborhood is relevant again. So definitely things feel booming. But it's also interesting to me where people are choosing to live this cycle relative to when we were coming up in SF. You know, I think in the 2010 decade, it was the mission that was the area that was getting a lot of love from the tech hipsters or youngsters, for lack of a better word. And now, actually, it's all the northern neighborhoods that have gotten the interest. And I don't know what that's a reflection of because I don't think the people are older.

3:43Do you think in part it could be because so many of the tech jobs were still in the peninsula then? And so it was also a commuting thing. Like I commuted to Palo Alto basically for nine years. But OpenAI is in Chase Center, Mission Bay, and Anthropic is sort of downtown. Like not super easy to get to from Presidio Heights or Pag Heights. Yeah, it's interesting to see the neighborhoods shift and what was popular and where all the development is happening. I think there's like a lot more restaurants and bars and coffee shops actually booming in the northern part of the city relative to the mission.

4:18It was totally flipped when we were in our 20s and 30s. I totally agree. And I feel like it's actually less of a like tech explanation, like, you know, which is a good one. Like everyone's commuting down or hopping on their company shuttles down to the peninsula. But I actually am a little more cynical than that. Shocking. I have a cynical take. um i feel like there was for a decade like a very anti-marina sort of attitude in tech like oh my god frat guy live in the marina jogging with their usc sweatshirt ha ha ha like and now like that's either i mean maybe it's both it's like not the case or like mainstream tech loves the marina and so like the second you start opening up like an entire part of the city so it's like marina kohala russian hill you know pack heights like that exactly what you said angela it's like the northern part of the city has has like become cool and slightly more normie if that makes sense versus like a certain type of person lives there which is i think what happened to the mission where it was like it used to be super grungy and hipster and then it became kind of mainstream e right and then like it's kind of less so because it is back to its kind of grungy roots i mean you think about what people complain about on twitter they don't want edgy grungy dirty like cool mission they want everything to be nice and to not see any signs of homelessness or poverty and so there are some neighborhoods that are better for that uh than others but yeah it's wild and i think we were talking about, there was a, I believe it was a Wall Street Journal piece, but I've definitely been seeing these stats go through my timeline.

6:04The details on the OpenAI secondary sales from last October were 600 current and former employees got to sell their shares. And there was like, overall, it was like a$6 billion secondary sale. And 75 people cashed out at the cap, which was 30 million. And so I feel like you haven't even begun to see that money really flow and then of course we have the spacex anthropic and open ai ipos in theory as for at some point this year and so i feel like the housing market is going to get crazier before we find some sort of new normal or we go through a bus cycle great chat enterprises we have a new product offering we're going to offer like just a package interior design like stylist preschool consultant like we're going to just offer the whole package you know that's pretty good yeah a wrapper for your life yes there we go well also in sf news slash propaganda um i think i shared that elad gill tweet that was basically asserting it's not just we're in different geographies we're in different timelines so people at the major ai labs are living three months ahead of the rest of like startup Silicon Valley engineers who are ahead of New York by another three to six months.

7:22And those people are ahead of the rest of the world by six to 12 months. And basically like that there's this like massive disconnect around where we are in AI geographically. And some people are living in the future and some people are living in the present. And not surprisingly, got a lot of both attention from people who love this story and a lot of pushback. Of course, there are plenty of really impressive AI companies that are not in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and it was very SF-centric. But I thought it was interesting because – and this is where my brain often goes. I was like, if this is true or if it's at least partially true, maybe it helps explain why the AI world is doing such a poor job of like telling its story to the rest of the world because people are just in like a fundamentally different reality.

8:14I feel like San Francisco is good at talking to San Francisco and then it really breaks down outside of that. But anyways, I don't know guys, I guess you're in the future, but you're behind the AI labs, I regret to inform you. And I'm six months behind you. Even within San Francisco, I do feel like I've got friends who are, like executives at tech companies that just sort of like don't care. That are just like, I'm just gonna worry about the things that I need to worry about. And they just like don't care if they're not gonna make it. And they seem very happy. And they are very much like, you know, have the blue chip resume and went and worked at all the right place.

8:55It's not like they're like Luddites and, you know, they're living in the past or something like that. And so I also feel like there's so much granularity within like these broad strokes that the people are painting as well. The SF propaganda. Yeah. I mean, like, what do you win? What is the prize for being ahead? You know that we're fucked sooner. That's true. Like, I feel like for the past like year and a half, I've just had this anxiety and I've just been processing, you know, what's happening. So I feel like now I've reached like a good point. and then the rest of the country is kind of catching up.

9:30So I do feel like you get to mentally adjust yourself sooner. And so I don't know what that's worth, though. That's just like a prolonged period of anxiety and stress. More capacity for worrying about Hansa virus. I'm going on a cruise. I'm going on a cruise in June. Wait, what? Because I paid an ungodly amount of money to Disney to go on this Alaska cruise. Okay, so like I can't even think about the amount of money that I would need to be paid to go on a cruise, let alone a Disney cruise. Angela, you're so brave. I feel like even separate from this, like cruises are like Petri dishes. And you are very brave.

10:10Does masking help a Tantavirus? What are the precautions you're supposed to take? We actually don't want to go into the details here because it's gross. Okay, fair enough. I will ask ChatJPT. You can do your own. research. I don't want to talk about it on our podcast. I do not want to solely our pod with the details of Hantavirus, which I unfortunately now know. Enough said. Pray for me because I will be offline in the Alaskan wilderness for seven days, potentially exposing myself to Hantavirus and just the whims of thousands of children on board a cruise ship. Which is scarier? I don't know. I went on a Disney cruise as a child and it was a real production.

10:53So I'm excited for you. Thank you. Thank you. So I feel like there's been a bit of a vibe shift with the – there was Coinbase and then there was Cloudflare. And like as we know, Jack at Block kind of kicked off this like latest wave of aggressive, aggressive layoffs sort of like in preparation for or in response to how AI is changing organizations. And there's all sorts of commentary around like how much that holds water or not. But I feel like generally, like the resection to that, his communication there was positive. It was positive in the stock price. You know, it came across as like courageous and willing to make the bold move, at least in the first wave of reactions.

11:43And I feel like for Coinbase, but then especially maybe Cloudflare and probably more from a timing and sequencing perspective than anything else. People are just more skeptical now. Well, that meta layoff is still pending, right? Yeah. That sucks. They had to announce it a month ahead. What an anxiety-inducing month for that whole team. And now I kind of feel like you can't really get ahead of it or like the narrative is kind of like there and you kind of just have to slot into it. Like, yep, we did this. It sucked. Here's how we're treating our departing employees with dignity. Like that's kind of all there is to do.

12:25Like it's, I would not recommend any company and sort of like do anything clever, her, if that makes sense. I don't know. I felt like both the Coinbase and Cloudflare layoffs, you know, there was criticism about how they had been overhiring or sort of boasting about how much they were hiring just not so long ago. And one thought that I had was like, oh, this is one of the downsides of being like such a main character on Twitter, right? Like people just, they remember everything you say and then those words are used to against you. But I don't know. All the layoffs are priced in, if that makes sense, you know, very much like emotionally and sort of from a narrative standpoint.

13:05And like priced in maybe from a stock market perspective now. Like I feel, I feel like we didn't see the... Coinbase did layoffs and their stock price went down, right? Same with Cloudflare, although it was like tied to their earnings. So I didn't pull that apart. But I mean, the one thing I admired in Brian Armstrong's communications around the Coinbase layoffs was that he did start by talking about like the sort of market and it wasn't like the company's going awesome and so we're celebrating by laying off half of our team. Like it was kind of a recognition of like, hey, like we need to do this.

13:45And then there was the sort of AI thought leadership layered in and I felt like the weight of that was like in how organizations and roles need to change. But there was definitely some acknowledgement that like there was a market reality that necessitated those layoffs. The most interesting critique I saw from like a couple different people, including Jim Prosser, who's former comms across a bunch of places, Google, Twitter, SoFi, some other stuff, was that all of these CEOs are talking about how roles are changing, orgs are changing. No one's talking about how their role is changing. And not to say you have to do that in a layoff comps, but it is really, it is interesting that this is all sort of happening to the rest of the org.

14:33And it does feel like an interesting opportunity for someone maybe separate from one of these types of announcements to talk about how like the CEO role itself is changing and maybe like lead by example a little bit. Yeah. I saw a tweet last week where it's like somebody who's running a consultancy for how to transition a lot of Fortune 500 companies to AI and how they're like making so much money. And yes, we've seen the revenue streams from the consulting firms themselves. And there was a news this morning about OpenAI. But what I found so interesting, and it's like those nice reminders that, okay, the Twitter is not real life, was like, it was such a shock, like such a surprise to people that like what's really getting people through this transition are soft skills.

15:19what else do you think people are going to get through this transition with i'm like okay shut the laptop like this is tough because like this is the largest change management exercise that any company has faced likely in their history even if they're like a hundred year old company like this is this is huge and um so for people to be surprised that it's going to take soft skills and communication to like get people through this i'm like what other tools did you think would be required for to meet this moment like more tech like no no tech is the thing like what it's a math problem helen come on exactly everyone just jump go through this obstacle course and then you know um solve this puzzle and yeah so it was just like you know we've been poo-pooing like these soft skills for a very long time now and i know that that we you know like generalists generalists and liberal arts majors like those things come in and out of favor or somebody who's really incredible will, you know, sort of nod to the things that the skills that they've acquired for that.

16:16But I think generally, because we work in tech, like we're going to be much more STEM inclined, right? All of our heroes are these STEM heroes. For people to come to realize like, oh, huh, that's not going to be the thing that gets us through this is like super interesting for me because we have not historically, I mean, like, what, Brene Brown, can you guys name like a EQ hero oh what's his name you know like it's just such a strange psychiatry guy who was um adam grant adam grant like not in this era but like a prior era steven sanofsky i know all these characters so they all like spoke at our sales kickoff i don't know like um it feels like the most like artsy we've gotten in tech is like when like designers are see like oh like brian chesky He is a designer.

17:06That's a good point. And that was a thing for a while. But also tech has been chipping away at soft skills. And I think about this a lot from the perspective of a parent. Like the other day, my kids were like, we want to watch like this thing on demand on Disney+. And I was thinking when we were kids, like you were just scrolling TV Guide and you took like whatever came at whatever moment. You know what I mean? Like you had to wait for Fridays for when your show came on. You had to wait for when the movie was on. It was not like instantaneously. I'm going to turn on the TV and get exactly what I want.

17:37And tech has made everything so much easier that I feel like kids in general just lack the soft skills to deal with frustration. And then I think about ChatGPT and you instantly get the answer to something. You don't have to work or struggle through to get to it. And so it's like at the same moment that soft skills and like emotional learning are important to navigate through, there's this whole generation that in some ways is very ill-equipped to get anything. You get anything on demand from Whole Foods. You order the thing you want from Amazon. You watch the TV that you want. You choose a song that you want.

18:08There's no sense of waiting or struggle or working through. And I think those two forces are going to be just interesting, not for our generation necessarily, but for like the generation alpha to grapple with as well because they don't have the soft skills training. We're going to have to send them all on those like wilderness excursions. Totally. It's going to be part of growing up. like go survive for a month in the builders. Speaking of changing times, our bigger topic this week, I think came up in two ways. One, we got a listener question, right? Around like mission driven startups and like what that looks like and if that's still a thing.

18:49And then I think, Helen, you and I as investors, I can certainly speak for myself. I have gotten questions from startups, especially startups that are about to tell their story for the first time, like how much they should lean into mission at launch and like lean into like being good for the world. And I think it forced a little reflection for all of us because we grew up, uh, grew up professionally in a very different era of tech where like everything was mission and where I I think we very uncynically and uncritically like embrace that part of startup life. And we're like in a very different era now.

19:30And so we thought it might be fun to like travel back in time a little bit and look at what that earlier era was like and then maybe take a fresh look because there certainly are mission-driven startups today, but it's a different flavor. But Ellen, you were like at the one of the most, like a Facebook was extremely mission-driven in its rhetoric, like around connecting the world. But now I don't think anyone thinks of them as a mission-driven company. So like take us back in time to like a different era where Facebook was a force for good in the world. Oh my goodness. Well, so okay, when I worked there, it was 2008 and the mission was to make the world more open and connected.

20:13And how that showed up was so interesting because I think that 2008 was such an interesting year, right? Like we've had the election that seemed like it, you know, the results were surprising, but there's all this grassroots organizing and a lot of people used Facebook for that organizing. And there were all these, there's over a thousand groups that were created to do a lot of that. And it was sort of the first social media election. And so it was very empowering, this idea that like, you know, you'd hear all these like feel good stories of people reconnecting with family members or childhood friends through the platform.

20:47It really felt like you were working on something bigger, even if you were working on the ads that nobody liked like me. And so my point there is like there was this mission and you felt connected to it, even if you weren't directly working on like, you know, that particular project or product that people touched. And there was Arab Spring, right? Like there was so much like incredible things happening in the world and employees definitely felt proud at that time. I think that there's probably still stories like that, but it's just the broader narratives of things that happen post sort of making it and like the success and, you know, maybe like the introspection of, oh, my gosh, what did he do?

21:31That happened, I think, post-2016 election, just eight years later. I think I have not really seen Facebook sort of recover from. So the question for me was like, you know, that's the era of tech that I grew up in. And, you know, of course, I worked at Quora and I worked at Dropbox. And there were a lot of, you know, movement of employees and leaders that went between those companies. And, you know, everyone really focused on the mission. And the thing that I remember the most actually was like when I was at Plaid, the mission was like to make the financial system work for everyone or to democratize access to the financial system.

22:05Actually, I think that that's what it was. And it was it was super inspiring because, you know, you felt that as a consumer or as a developer or whoever that like, yeah, the financial system is something that really only the top banks, right, really controlled and regulated and like worked for the wealthiest individuals in this country. And it was such an inspiring mission. And that was kind of the time of like peak talent wars where we've talked about this on the pod before. right? Like, it's they're not related, but they're kind of loosely coupled where it's like, that's when we saw kind of the peak of like DEI programs where who had the power was really the employees.

22:39And what we mean by that is like, big tech was doing its thing too, where they were offering new grads, like extraordinary starting offers for startups to be able to compete with a Google or Facebook offer at the time was was almost impossible. Like venture was a lot smaller, Even the most well-funded companies are, they do not look like the way that they look today. And so having a really inspiring mission, one that felt bigger than you, bigger than the company, was actually how you got a lot of young, idealistic, talented people to take that lower startup offer than to go work at Fang. And now what's so interesting is we're kind of like in this like no mission era.

23:19We're kind of in this like pragmatic, our mission is to like get to AGI. Our missions are a lot more capitalist, it feels like. Yeah, yeah. But even like before capitalism, I feel like the goal, because I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure, I know, that like inside the companies, the like CEO rousing, you know, speeches aren't about money. I'm sure that there is something that leads to money, but it's like, I'm sure there is like something before the money. And those things are very like either technical thresholds or like, we just have to beat these other guys. and I just wonder, you know, what is, how do young people today, especially those who, you know, looks like they spent a lot of the years in college, like living at home and not having like the college experience that we did, right?

24:08Like how do they find meaning, meaning through the work and how do they think about the way that they spend the majority of their like waking hours, you know, of the day? And so that was something that we had discussed in the group chat as well. Like what are the big mission company, mission-driven companies today that are hot, like the way Facebook was hot in 2008? Well, I mean, Anthropic is the one that comes to mind for me. And it's a very different type of mission than Facebook or Twitter or Airbnb. Or I was at Box, the enterprise software company. We were very mission-driven, which is like kind of funny to think about.

24:47Like you got to get really excited about enterprise file sharing collaboration. Totally. We had one at Dropbox too. It was - Help businesses get more value from their information. But I feel like Dropbox and Tuck Shop, that more than the mission, I feel like that was probably the biggest drop for employees that kept Canteen. It was incredible. But I mean, Helen, to your point, I almost feel like it's, you know, tech is a reflection of what's happening in the broader ecosystem. And those years that we came up in tech in terms of what was happening in the world, There was all this positive momentum, like the Barack Obama campaign and how closely that was tied to young people and social media and the green movement and all the energy.

25:29And now I don't think you feel that same energy. And so in some ways, I think it's just a reflection, like tech and the mission orientation is also a reflection of the broader backdrop. One thing I was thinking about is it feels like a lot of the prior era of missions were set or baked before like pre-monetization, especially on the consumer front, right? So like Facebook was all about connecting people and like the ad business kind of came later or at least was massive later. And so I think like the business parts of the company are baked in a little bit earlier now, especially since we're in this era of like insane capital concentration and growth and amassing that capital.

26:17And then the talent and attention is like so poor to winning. And so it almost felt like in many ways the prior era of missions were, if not disconnected from the business models, they were not always aligned. and I think we have like a little bit more alignment in this current era. This is also an era of like winners and losers. I mean you think about the rhetoric coming from the White House and we're just in this like very sort of zero-sum mentality and that filters through. So whereas I feel like the prior era of missions was all about like how are you going to do good in the world, this era of start at missions feels more adversarial to me.

26:59Like, what are you against? And that's not always the case. So you think about Anthropic. Anthropic is a spike company. I mean, like, but with, like, it exists to beat open AI to AGI in many ways, right? And if you talk to people who work there, there really is, like, an orientation around we have to be faster, we have to be first. Winning is core to the mission in a way that it didn't feel like it was for prior eras. Same with the whole American dynamism cinematic universe, right? It's like America has to beat China and communism. But the thing that's very interesting is when missions are inherently adversarial, it almost takes a little pressure off of articulating the future vision.

27:40What's important is winning. It's not like, hey, here's this future state we're moving towards. I feel like actually the vision for companies today or what happens if you win is still a little bit of an unanswered question. The important thing is winning. And then here are all the proof points. Here's our growth. through our funding, all of that stuff. And so I think we still have like very mission-driven startups, but it's just a very different way of thinking about mission. The mission is to win. I was thinking the same thing, which is like before it was like you could do all these, you could cure cancer, you could like help solve Medicare, you could, you know, help create financial freedom.

28:22And now with the narrative of AI and this one model to rule us all, I think everyone is just thinking the only way to win is to amass more capital. And so everything has just become oriented around how do you amass capital? And that's a very different mission than how do you solve a bunch of problems. I think a lot of founders also learned the hard way that like while mission can be incredible for attraction and retaining talent, it's also a double-edged sword when it comes to having to make business decisions that aren't like perfectly aligned with the mission. I'm using about all the times that Google employees have protested Google taking a certain contract because they felt like it was against the company's values or like having to do layoffs, like feels like a contradiction to this like rosy picture.

29:07And so I also wonder if a lot of this recalibration is like, how do we get people inspired around an idea, but not have that idea in any way in opposition to our business? So a company, yeah. One thing I was thinking was, have you guys heard, you know, the company's Zipline? Yeah. Yeah. So like Zipline is a, I think probably one of the best examples I can think of that like pretty much reoriented its mission, like 180 degrees, but like got through it successfully because I think that their cap table changed and I think their executive team changed and their employee base changed. And so, and also like the tide shifted as well in their favor.