YC Annual Letter 2017
&gt; 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission?<p>&gt; 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.<p>I find this one interesting. When Google started, there were many incumbent search engines. Their mission was to provide better results than what existed, i.e. improve on an existing product.<p>Uber&#x27;s &quot;mission&quot; was to get privileged people with smart phones and disposable income a sexy&#x2F;cool ride home from the bar.<p>Facebook was a social networking site targeted at college students...what was it&#x27;s mission? To allow people to see what that cute person in their Psych class was up to this weekend?<p>Snapchat...the clear and important mission to allow for safely sending risqué pictures?<p>While I believe Sam&#x27;s belief that they WANT to work with companies with clear important missions, that doesn&#x27;t seem to be a&#x2F;the deciding factor in becoming &quot;very large&quot;, or attracting great people. If anything, it seems like the &quot;spaghetti at the wall&quot; approach is what happens - some startups gain momentum, and then it&#x27;s the high growth trajectory that attracts a ton of talent.