Mission, vision, and values: setting your startup up for success

Why and how to create the foundational building blocks that drive corporate culture, inform hiring practices, and affect business outcomes.

Image via GPT-4

One of my favorite lectures I gave as part of the teaching team for Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (MS&E) class was called “Operating Mission, Vision, and Values.” The lecture covered mission and vision statements, why they matter, and how to set your company’s values from the early days and ensure they help support your ability to achieve your mission.

Defining your company’s reason for existence at the very outset is crucial. When moving quickly, it’s essential to take a step back, reflect on your ultimate objective, and ensure that your foundations are solid. Crafting your vision, mission, and values will help you stay focused, orient resources in the most productive way, and inspire and align your team.

What are the differences between your vision, mission, and values and why do they matter?

You may wonder how a mission differs from a vision and what value statements are for. The vision is the inspirational true north of the company. For example, LinkedIn’s Vision statement is:

Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.

It’s brief, inspirational, and shouldn’t change over the company’s life.

The mission statement takes the vision and makes it more specific and actionable. It should be measurable, achievable, and ideally inspirational. The mission should not be used synonymously with a vision statement. A great mission statement is brief, easy to remember, and minimizes using the word “and” to prevent a laundry list. The mission also shouldn’t require follow-up clarifying questions when first presented and should ideally prove uniquely identifiable to the company. It shouldn’t be confused with another company’s mission. Here’s LinkedIn’s Mission statement:

Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.

Your values emanate from the vision and mission, and are fundamental beliefs that guide the company’s operating plan and motivate the company’s day-to-day decisions.

You may be wondering why these concepts matter and why startups should think about them early on in their company’s lifetime. From my own experience helping build and grow transformational businesses, I’ve seen firsthand the wide ranging impact these foundational building blocks can have on a company’s trajectory. What happens when companies take a focus on transparency a bit too far? How can massively scaling companies instill a sense of humility? In what ways can values contribute to problematic employee behavior? Below, I’ll share a few specific examples from my time at Twitter, Stripe, and Uber to illustrate how mission, vision, and values drive corporate culture, impact hiring practices, and affect business outcomes.

From vision to values in the early days at Twitter

I joined Twitter (now X) in 2010 when the company had fewer than 200 employees, no advertising products, and was gearing up to start monetizing and building a business.

At the time, these were Twitter’s vision and mission statements:

Vision: Give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.

Mission: Democratize content creation and distribution, enabling any voice to echo around the world instantly and unfiltered.

These helped guide our various team goals and workstreams and served as inspiration for our various efforts (though I’d argue, some additional specificity would have been useful).

And Twitter’s value statements at the time:

1. Grow the business in a way that makes us proud.

2. Recognize that passion and personality matter.

3. Communicate fearlessly to build trust.

4. Defend and respect the user’s voice.

5. Reach every person on the planet.

6. Innovate through experimentation.

7. Seek diverse perspectives.

8. Be rigorous. Get it right.

9. Simplify.

10. Ship it.

The first value (“grow the business in a way that makes us proud”) was extremely topical, since I joined about a month before we launched our first advertising product. This translated to building a sustainable business, but not letting revenue become a distraction or conflict with our goal of enabling all types of communication freely and easily. We were very particular and sensitive to details around how ads should be integrated into the experience, to ensure it felt authentic to our broader mission and vision.

Twitter was a place that celebrated diverse perspectives and cultures, both internally and externally, as underscored by values like “recognize that passion and personality matter” and “defend and respect the user’s voice”. That philosophy showed up in media campaigns highlighting tweets worldwide, user stories shared at our weekly “Tea Time” company all hands, our myriad Employee Resource Groups internally, and so on.

Sometimes, employees took values a bit too literally. As a communications company, Twitter valued transparency — to the point of broadcasting all-company emails even when the subject wasn’t necessarily broadly relevant. Sometimes, this approach led to oversharing and information overload. My favorite example was an announcement our CEO made at Tea Time reminding us that now that we were 500 people and had offices worldwide, we didn’t need to email the whole global company if we were going to come in to the San Francisco office late due to a dentist appointment. While we still wanted to “communicate fearlessly to build trust”, we discovered we needed to strike the right balance.

At every company I’ve worked at, certain values seemed to conflict with each other, and that tension (while healthy!) did have to be navigated. At Twitter, this was particularly obvious with “Be rigorous. Get it right.” and “Ship it.” While we did sweat the details, we also wanted to move quickly, and this tension proved a persistent challenge over my four years at the company. When growing quickly startups often face constant trade-offs; sometimes, you need to lean more in one direction than the other. Sometimes the pendulum can swing too far in one direction and course correction is required. The key is to establish memorable values, so ingrained in the culture that everyone easily recalls them, from leadership to building security staff. To this day, when catching up with people I worked with at Twitter more than a decade ago, I’ll hear references to these values (ie “should I actually write a blog on values?” “Yes, ‘Ship it!’”)

Under the hood at Stripe

As a company, Stripe has a weighty responsibility to safeguard the funds and livelihoods of businesses and individuals around the world. Our vision, mission, and values reflected our dedication to the customers whose lives we directly impacted. When I was at Stripe, this was the company’s Vision to Values:

Vision: Increase the GDP of the internet.

Mission: Build economic infrastructure for the internet, enabling businesses of every size — from news startups to public companies — to use our software to accept payments and manage their business online.

Values:

1. We haven’t won yet.

2. Move with urgency and focus.

3. Think rigorously.

4. Trust and amplify.

5. Global optimization.

6. Optimism.

7. Front page test.

While I was at Stripe, we introduced a culture site that (at the time) included questions related to each of these values, that potential new hires could ask themselves before applying for a job there (they’ve since been edited to be a little less controversial). We wanted people to self-select out of the interview process if these values didn’t align with their way of working.

One of my favorite Stripe value statements was “we haven’t won yet”. Our founders meant to instill a long-term orientation and a sense of humility that would ensure we kept the ultimate vision in mind, even as Stripe achieved new milestones like total processing volume, number of businesses customers, revenue, or more “vanity” metrics like valuation increases or headcount expansion. To prospective new hires, we underscored that regardless of what measures of success we might have achieved at that point, now was still a great time to join Stripe, as we had many problems yet to solve. During new hire onboarding, Patrick would underscore this point by sharing a list of companies with more employees and revenue than Stripe had at that moment in time that had gotten complacent and drifted off into obscurity, long forgotten (for recent Stripe new hires: I’d be curious if he still does this in 2024!).

Move with urgency and focus: In direct contrast to Facebook’s “move fast and break things,” this value was a reminder that Stripe’s users entrust the company with their money, their businesses, and their livelihoods and we had to take that responsibility seriously. Millions of businesses worldwide are open for business only if Stripe is. This meant that while we did aim to move quickly, we couldn’t afford to move so fast that things would break. It mattered when we messed up, missed a deadline, or slowed down.

Think rigorously was often referred to as “think from first principles”. I’ve joked in the past that John and Patrick Collison are the most academically-minded college dropouts I’ve ever met. They both have an insatiable thirst for knowledge that permeates through the organization. John and Patrick encourage their employees (called “Stripes”) to question assumptions, seek to learn from those who share different world views, and push back when anyone assumes that because something has been the status quo for a while, Stripe should take that for granted. I think this value helps explain how two young brothers with no finance experience built one of the most important fintech companies of our generation.

Another one of my favorite parts of Patrick’s new hire onboarding presentation was when he described how many companies abide by the “no asshole rule”. Patrick underscored that he felt this bar was in fact way too low. Trust and amplify implied that we should seek to far exceed that goal. Stripes were expected to actively support each other, assume good intentions, and share others’ wins across and outside the organization. This particular value felt in stark contrast to some of Uber’s core values at the time I was there (more on that below), and was a refreshing change.

When selected correctly, core values can have multiple correct interpretations. For example, “global optimization” has many layers. Perhaps most obviously, in a world where regulations, the speed of money movement, and banking infrastructure differ by geography, we always sought to provide the best global experience and reduce barriers for international companies. The more nuanced interpretation is that Stripes do what is best for Stripe overall, not just what’s in their job description or on their team’s list of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). This is critical and has implications for the organization’s structure, how feedback is given, and how responsibilities are handled.

At Stripe, we sought a balance between “micro-pessimism and macro-optimism.” In other words, sweat the details on a day-to-day basis, but keep a positive long-term view in mind. We often did what were called “premortems” before products launched, where we presupposed that the product failed somehow and then attempted to prepare for all the possible outcomes. (My colleague Shreyas first introduced this concept to me and has an excellent post summarizing the practice here.) In the long run, we spent more time thinking about why something would work than why it wouldn’t. This balance is core to Stripe’s success, and, now as a venture-capitalist, also in line with my approach to company-picking and building.

Last but certainly not least, was the front page test. This value is adapted from a famous Warren Buffet quote, in which he asked his managers how they would feel about any given action if they knew it would be written up the next day in their local newspaper. Stripe has a high bar for ethics across the board. In an industry where some had cut corners to move more quickly, we wanted to ensure we were doing the right thing.

Out of all the organizations I’ve been a part of, Stripe’s vision, mission, and values resonated with me the most, and guide much of the way I operate to this day. While they don’t work for all individuals or all organizations, I particularly appreciate the combination of near-term focus and long-term perspective, encouragement to question the status quo, humility, and focus on doing the right thing for your fellow employees and customers.

Toe-stepping and hustling: Uber’s values and culture in 2015

While I was only at Uber for a few months during business school, the company’s mission, vision, and values (in 2015) are an interesting reflection of the unique market environment they operated in relative to Twitter and Stripe, and also help elucidate why the culture was so fundamentally different. Five years into Uber’s company journey, at the time, the company had 4,000 employees, operated in 300 cities worldwide, and had recently launched it’s most ambitious product yet, UberPOOL.

Uber’s mission was:

“Transportation as reliable as running water, for everyone, everywhere”.

Values play a large part in determining which types of behaviors are rewarded or reprimanded inside an organization. Travis Kalanick introduced these 14 values in 2015 (but new norms have since replaced them).

1. Customer obsession (“Start with what is best for the customer.”)

2. Make magic (“Seek breakthroughs that will stand the test of time.”)

3. Big, bold bets (“Take risks and plant seeds that are five to ten years out.”)

4. Inside out (“Find the gap between popular perception and reality.”)

5. Champion’s mindset (“Put everything you have on the field to overcome adversity and get Uber over the finish line.”)

6. Optimistic leadership (“Be inspiring.”)

7. Superpumped (“Ryan Graves’s original Twitter proclamation after Kalanick replaced him as CEO; the world is a puzzle to be solved with enthusiasm.”)

8. Be an owner, not a renter (“True believers win revolutions”.)

9. Meritocracy and toe-stepping (“The best idea always wins. Don’t sacrifice truth for social cohesion, and don’t hesitate to challenge the boss.”)

10. Let builders build (“People must be empowered to build things.”)

11. Always be hustlin’ (“Get more done with less, working longer, harder, and smarter, not just two out of three.”)

12. Celebrate cities (“Everything we do is to make cities better.”)

13. Be yourself (“Each of us should be authentic.”)

14. Principled confrontation (“Sometimes, the world and institutions need to change for the future to be ushered in.”)

Uber was building rideshare and delivery products that faced fierce competition across every product line and every geo we operated in. This necessitated a certain sense of urgency which is obvious from these values. A few of the values stood out to me in particular, over the course of my time on Uber for Business’ product team.

Big, bold bets were extremely core to Uber’s culture and represented a stark contrast to the slow, methodical product evolution during my time at Twitter. We released new versions of the app weekly, and leaders were quick to admit that we’d be perfectly comfortable killing new products if they didn’t perform. The most important thing was that we took risks. UberPOOL was released in 2015 and represented a massive technical and operational risk with the complicated routing algorithms and challenges associated with pooling different riders together on the same route, and in the same vehicle.

One could argue that “toe-stepping” and “principled confrontation” might go hand in hand with a culture that encourages taking big bold bets, especially if those bets were controversial. These values encouraged behavior that was fairly shocking coming from a culture as warm and fuzzy as Twitter’s was during my time there. For example, I would frequently see Google Docs announcing new initiatives shared to the whole company with comments from other team members publicly denouncing the new projects and suggesting they be shut down.

Always be hustlin’ was another value that was obviously felt throughout the organization. In 2015, dinner at Uber was served around 8pm (in contrast to 6pm at Twitter), as a way to encourage employees to stay later and keep working (or at least give the perception of working long hours), as face time in the office was a highly rewarded and expected behavior. It also showed up in more nuanced ways. For example, in contrast to the CEO update presentations at Twitter that typically included painstakingly beautiful Keynote presentations, at Uber, Travis would usually use a simple black and white Google slides presentation for his all-hands updates, sometimes with (gasp!) misaligned bullet points and plain text. The message I took away was that speed and efficiency were more valued than perfectionism.

Some of these values (in addition to others on this list) have been cited as enabling and possibly even encouraging a series of scandals that ensued and ultimately resulted in Travis Kalanick’s departure from the company. When Dara Khosrowshahi took over as CEO in 2017, he quickly replaced the core values with ones that maintained the focus on urgency and risk-taking, but replaced the more problematic values that could be seen as encouraging bad behavior.

Take the time to start your company off right

Hopefully the examples above from LinkedIn, Twitter, Uber, and Stripe help elucidate how important vision, mission, and values are for defining the foundation of your company and its culture. Because your company operates in a unique market, time period, and set of circumstances and has a particular reason for existence, your mission, vision, and values statements will likely look quite different from those I’ve shared here. As you build and grow your company, it’s important to think about what types of behaviors and company outcomes you can encourage or discourage with your foundational messaging. While they will likely shift and evolve over the company’s journey, it’s worth taking the time to craft these important fundamentals with thoughtful care and attention from day 1.