A startup's clearest hiring advantage is a mission bigger than profit. Once a company shifts focus to chasing money, momentum dies and the original vision gets diluted. Purpose attracts people excited to solve the problem; profit alone doesn't.
I think that comes back to having a purpose that's attracting that talent. I think it's quite surprising what you can pull off when the mission is bigger than just sort of making money. The purpose is bigger than making money, and it pulls people to that purpose. I think that mission, that vision, that sense of purpose at the beginning pulls people into the business and they kind of love coming to work to work on this problem. So I think when you're very small, that's actually works to your advantage. And then you hit like a revenue plateau or something and you lose momentum and you start chasing the money instead of chasing or following or pursuing your purpose. I think that's where things start to kind of wobble.
Reducing Regrettable Attrition in Organizations by Fixing the System, Not the People Reducing Regret
