Brian Armstrong: preference

Transcript context

…Why do companies have mission statements at all? We would all agree, “Well, companies should stay within the law, and then there’s an obligation to maximize profits.” What extra is the mission statement adding? Or is that a Straussian layering on top to make it all sound better? When we say, “Oh, a company should stick to its mission,” what’s wrong with just following the law and maximizing profits? It’s an interesting philosophical question. To me, the mission serves a different purpose. Let’s just take for granted you’re going to follow the law, and what you’re really doing with the mission is, you’re saying this company is aligned towards creating some good thing in the world, and it’s important for a few reasons. One is that people don’t want to work at a company that just — its only goal is to make profit. I think profit is incredibly important — don’t get me wrong — but if that’s the only thing that people are joining for, it tends to be a soulless company or something like that. It’s also like it’s a filter, you could say. You want to make sure that people are coming into the company for the right reasons because, as you hire more and more people, you can’t interview each of them yourself as the founder, so you have to put certain structure in place to make sure the people who are joining are all aligned towards some common vision of the world that you all want to create, and it creates that healthy culture and that selection of great people into the company, along with the motivation. Those are my high-level thoughts, I guess. But say someone came along and offered you a million bitcoins to breed green rabbits, and that would make the company a lot of money. It’s probably not in your current mission statement, but at some margin, you would consider doing it, right? There’s like a mission statement above the mission statement? Or how does one think about that?…

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