Why Mission is Your Best Profit Mechanism

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.

Jan 04, 2025

The memory is still vivid. A balcony or a sidewalk near the office door, whisky in hand, partner and myself smoking while watching smoke drift into the dark as another brilliant optic physic joined our ranks. We'd built one of the most sophisticated advertising&segmentation engines in the world, going toe-to-toe with Google and Yandex, generating good profits, but…

We were recruiting one of the brightest minds – physicists, chemistry scientists, mathematicians who could be solving humanity's hardest problems. Instead, their brilliance was being channeled into making people buy things they probably didn't need. Our algorithms were so good at prediction and influence that it was almost scary. We paid these brilliant minds triple their academic salaries, effectively buying their potential impact on real human problems and converting it into click-through rates.

"Look what we've built," either me or my partner said pouring another whisky. "The most sophisticated manipulation engine in this part of the world, powered by people who could be curing diseases or solving climate change."

The Mission Machine

Let me be ruthlessly clear about something fundamental: A business exists to generate returns for shareholders. Period. Everything else - including mission - must serve this core purpose. But here's where most people get it wrong. They see mission as either a marketing tool or a moral obligation that restrains profit. Both views miss the mechanical beauty of what a mission really is.

A properly engineered mission is the most powerful profit-generation mechanism ever created. But it only works if you build real wealth creation systems beneath it. Yes, you must be a greedy bastard to be a successful C/Board-level person - that's literally what you're selected for. But the real art is creating mechanisms where others can be greedy bastards too.

I'm not talking about optimising existing products or improving margins - that's just keeping the lights on. I'm talking about creating entirely new value streams. If someone in your company builds a new business line that generates $100M in value, they should capture $50M of it. Not because you're generous - because it's good mechanics. They'll immediately start hunting for the next billion opportunity.

This is what separates great companies from good ones: The great ones build systems where anyone smart enough to create massive new value can get genuinely rich from it. Not just comfortable. Not just well-paid. Fucking Rich.

Your mission makes this possible in three ways:

First, it's a talent arbitrage mechanism. Your mission lets you hire brilliant people for less money than your competitors. It helps you retain them longer because humans crave meaning. In pure economic terms, this is an enormous competitive advantage - you're literally buying intellectual capital at a discount.

Second, it's a decision-making accelerant. When people believe in your mission, they make faster, better decisions aligned with long-term value creation. They solve harder problems. They think in decades, not quarters. They find non-obvious solutions that your competitors miss.

Third, and most importantly, it's a scalable motivation engine. Money alone hits diminishing returns as a motivator. But combine significant wealth creation potential with meaningful work? That's a force multiplier that scales almost infinitely.

But - and this is crucial - this only works if you're brutally honest about it. Your mission isn't about saving the world. If you want to save the world, build a massively successful business and donate your wealth to experts who specialise in world-saving. They'll do it better than you can while trying to run a business.

Your mission is about building mechanisms that make getting rich an inevitable side effect of solving valuable problems. Everything else is self-deception.

The Public Company Challenge

In the startup world, this problem is relatively straightforward to solve. Smart founders understand that their people are their most valuable asset and structure option packages accordingly. When you own significant equity and have a clear path to wealth creation through value creation, mission and profit naturally align.

But what happens when you scale? When you go public? This is where things get interesting.

Public companies face a unique tension between quarterly performance and long-term value creation. The pressure to hit numbers every three months can kill any meaningful innovation or mission-driven transformation.

This is where the Yandex model was fascinating.

The Yandex Model:

1. The Core Cash Machine

- Search and advertising: predictable, high-margin business

- Keeps the public market happy with consistent growth

- Funds the aggressive expansion into new verticals

2. The Vertical Value Creation Engine

Each new business line (ride-hailing, delivery, e-commerce, education, cloud) operates as a separate vertical with:

- Its own P&L

- Dedicated leadership

- Specific equity pool

- Clear path to either IPO or value capture

3. The Talent Allocation Mechanism

- Engineers and leaders could move from core business to new verticals

- Each vertical offered founding-team equity packages

- Clear wealth creation path: build a billion-dollar business, own a meaningful piece of it

The results speak volumes. Multiple billion-dollar businesses emerged:

- Yandex.Taxi merged with Uber Russia (was a multi-billion dollar entity)

- Yandex.Market became a dominant e-commerce player

- New verticals kept attracting top talent with public company stability plus startup upside

The Core Business Paradox

Some might ask: "Won't everyone just chase new verticals if that's where the real wealth is? Who will run the core business?"

The answer is surprisingly simple: Most people can't build new businesses. This isn't a criticism - it's just reality. Your core business will always have talent because most people are naturally suited to optimising and operating existing systems rather than creating new ones.

You don't need to artificially constrain opportunities or create barriers. In fact, having clear paths to massive wealth creation acts as a natural sorting mechanism. People self-select into roles where they can create the most value based on their capabilities.

I'll dig deeper into the archetypes of builders, conductors, and coasters in my next article. But for now, understand this: Your job isn't to protect your core business from talent drain. Your job is to create opportunities for wealth creation and let people find their natural level.

The Real Truth

That whisky-fueled moment of doubt? I was naive then, sad for the wrong reasons. The real failure wasn't that we were pulling brilliant minds into advertising. The failure was in my own limited thinking.

With a different narrative - the same exact business, the same technology, the same talent - we could have scaled from a 100M business to billions. Nothing about the core business needed to change. We just needed to craft a better mission machine, one that would attract even more brilliant minds and give them even bigger problems to solve.

We weren't just optimising ad clicks - we were building one of the world's most sophisticated acquisition and retention engines. We weren't just selling different ads and marketing tools - we were creating a new way for businesses to reach their customers. The technology, the talent, the potential - it was all there. We just needed to think bigger and go for more markets.

The right question isn't whether you're the bad guy for making people rich. The right question is: Are you building mechanisms that make getting rich an inevitable side effect of solving important problems at massive scale?

Because when you get that right, you don't need to choose between mission and money. They become the same thing.

Scale & Signal

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