One of my favorite lectures I gave for Stanford's Entrepreneurial Leadership course (with Tina Seelig, Tom Byers, Mo Fong, and Steve Loughlin) was called "Mission, Vision, and Values". Having spent time building and launching products, markets, and teams at Twitter, Uber, and Stripe, I've thought deeply about how important it is to carefully craft your startup's foundational reason for being and mechanisms to operate from the very beginning.
Reflecting on my time at those organizations, I shared some examples of how your mission, vision, and values need to accurately reflect the environment in which you operate and the type of company you want to build. It's a meaty topic, so it's my longest blog post yet.
In it you'll find some snippets including:
- The difference between mission, vision, and values, and why each matters
- How to navigate values that seem to contradict each other (my fellow Tweeps will remember "Be rigorous, get it right" and "Ship it.")
- How to create and share values that are meant to be a little controversial so prospective new hires can self-select in or out appropriately (shoutout to Eeke de Milliano for helping craft Stripe's first "culture site")
- How to balance humility and healthy skepticism with long-term optimism (something I learned from Shreyas Doshi' practice of pre-mortems)
- The way in which your competitive environment can impact the values you craft in order to shape which behaviors get rewarded
- And what happens when those values have unintended consequences that necessitate a major update
If you get through the whole post, would love to hear what you think!
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