I Love Backing ‘Mission-Driven’ Founders But Here’s Where They Struggle as Startup CEOs
Learnings From a Decade Investing In These Types of Leaders
We’ve sent hundreds of millions of dollars to startup bank accounts but none of those have gone to teams which don’t have at least one founder we consider to be ‘mission-driven.’ How do I define that term? Loosely, someone who has a personal connection to the problem they’re trying to solve. The tie is sometimes very intimate (as an individual, familial, and so on). Or linked to what they’ve studied (academic) or worked on previously (vocational). They’ve often been thinking about it deeply ahead of even understanding whether it could be a startup or would be an attractive, valuable issue to address. Not everyone on the founding team needs to fit this criteria but we do try to understand the different motivations at an individual level.
But I’ll tell you, my experience suggests that mission-driven founders also have some hurdles to becoming great leaders and CEOs. Their challenges are not exclusively felt by people with their motivational DNA, but 10 years of venture investing, seeing thousands and thousands of startups, does suggest, at least anecdotally, that mission-driven founders more often experience the following challenges:
