Don’t let money be your startup mission

This article on Harvard Business Review said it right: “Successful Startups Don’t Make Money Their Primary Mission”

While many budding founders might be tempted by the money and glory in the tech industry in the initial phase, the hardship they faced along the way changed them into mission driven entrepreneurs.

IMHO, founders who are successful tend to be able to see the bigger picture and not let money be their startup mission. If you’re in a startup that is too focused on exits and forget about the big picture mission, chances are, the founders might have lost it. You can’t build a Google or Facebook without being mission driven. This part of the article sums things up nicely:

“Imagine if Google and Facebook had sold to Yahoo for a billion each — a great outcome by any measure. But inside Yahoo, would Google have continued its crazy missionary projects, like scanning the world’s libraries or organizing all scholarly papers? Would Facebook have connected everybody with social news feeds and a constant flow of new mobile products?”

The answer is no.