Peter Thiel explains the difference between a mission-driven company and social entrepreneurship

I don't think businesses work best when they're just about making money. At the same time, I'm also somewhat skeptical of the sort of social entrepreneurship as a category, and I differentiate that very sharply from mission oriented businesses. A mission oriented business is one where you're working on a problem that if you don't work on it, nobody else in the world will. And I think that sort of tends to imbue things with a very deep sense of purpose. We have this novel approach for curing cancer. No one else believes it makes any sense. If we don't do it, nobody will. There's something very powerful about that. Whereas I think social entrepreneurship, where you have this idea that we will do well by doing good, you often end up doing neither. And I think one of the things people get tripped up on is that the word social is a very ambiguous word. It can mean, number one, good for society, which, and I think is a good thing. But it can also mean, number two, good as seen by society. And when it's good as seen by society, you end up with copycat MeToo, the 100th microlending company, the 10th online pet food company. And whenever you're in the nth company of a category, that's not a place you want to be.