YC Annual Letter 2017

What you're describing is products, which represent a manifestation of one piece of the mission, and are a building block that helps construct a world in which the mission is possible.

Google, for example, is (and was) on a mission to do much more than build a really sweet search engine. Their goal from the beginning has been (though now refined): "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That's a little bit easier to get behind, isn't it?

Uber isn't about "getting privileged people with smart phones and disposable income a sexy/cool ride home from the bar;" its mission statement is, "make transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone."

Facebook? From the beginning Zuck stated his goal was to "Make the world more open and connected."

Snapchat, according to Spiegel, is about making it easy to "communicate with the full range of human emotion."

It takes years and insane amounts of effort from large numbers of people to build even one tiny piece of each of these missions (which makes sense - they're enormous missions). But working for a very mission-driven company, I can attest that it's the mission that keeps me going, even when I'm only one tiny spoke in one of the many products that will contribute a tiny piece to making the mission eventually more achievable.

It seems you are viewing these products in a very negative light, and in doing so you're missing the forest for the trees. I would guess that all of the companies above will be wildly successful, and will have a wide range of products, all dedicated to achieving their stated mission. Rome wasn't built in a day.

For a specific example: Lets say you are a PhD computer vision team and you want to create a machine vision API, where anyone can upload an image and return a list of objects in that image. Your product will be less capable than the Google Vision API or the Microsoft Vision API to start with, simply because they have orders of magnitude more data and personnel they can train their networks with. Now lets say you have a novel technique that is faster or needs less data. Ok, well more than likely Google or Microsoft would come to you with $XXM and offer to buy you out. You say no, we're gonna win this space. Well unfortunately, Google/MSFT personnel go to the same vision conferences, recruit equally if not more competent personnel and they just recreate your solution, even if slightly less capable. They also have a much bigger sales staff so they can always beat you at BD and support etc...

So the question in my mind is: Is the bar to compete unreasonably high such that you effectively need hundreds of millions of dollars to compete?

I use Machine Learning examples because they are literally where the biggest competitive gains and fastest growth are happening - also what I know the best in this case.

However I see this happening in almost every market, home furnishings (the market we play in most) is seeing the same thing, but with logistics/fulfillment instead of machine learning - such that the big retailers/manufacturers can take advantage of more efficient fulfillment than smaller ones can.

If you measure missions by how much the potential audience wants them to succeed, I'd say this is pretty huge.

That doesn't necessarily make it a very compelling thing to work on, but "safer sexting" is way more important than "ads on everything."

That's exactly the point. Google didn't start with that mission, it had to be refined. And Google, meaning Larry and Sergey working on algo's prior to actually starting a commercial entity. The parent's point is that many of the most successful tech investments have come from businesses that are generally dismissed as toys in their initial phases. YC invests in companies at their earliest stage, so it seems odd that the mission statement needs to be so well refined. This invariably means there's a disconnect between what pg has traditionally said and what sama is dictating now.

> Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.

http://paulgraham.com/organic.html

Anyway, I think the reason that sama says this is because it is absolutely essentially for a company to get big, but that doesn't mean they need to have it right away. Also, let's be fair, determining something that is clear and important is very subjective.