An investor asked a founder named Rob the question mission-driven founders dread: do you want to make an impact or make money? Pick one. Rob said money. If people won't pay him for what he builds, what impact is he having?
Anthony, who tells the story, calls it the most rational answer he's heard. A venture that isn't trying to make money is a nonprofit, and a nonprofit runs a different way. The best way to make an impact is to succeed at what you're building.
That tension sits under every mission pitch. When an investor pulled out of a funding round at Embrace, which makes infant warmers, the team deferred their salaries for a year. They believed in the mission. Keeping it alive still came down to money.
Anthony pushes the point further: what business wouldn't say it's making an impact? If you aren't removing pain, taking work off someone's plate, improving health, or creating stability, what are you charging for? Stephanie draws a narrower line. As an investing category, impact means an overt social story, like microlending for women in developing countries. Those businesses are likely less focused on big profits, so they need a different type of funding, from investors who weigh social good alongside whether the business is a reasonable investment.
Stephanie's own business found its mission second. Her team built the business model first, around a place in the market that wasn't well served. After a year or two of doing the work, they saw real gaps for women, and the model they'd built filled them. The mission now: be the pathway for women to build wealth in ways they haven't had access to, by reworking older private equity models into something more equitable. A mission found by doing the work rests on gaps you've seen up close, so it's easier to defend. Anthony's suspicion is the flip side: a lot of companies, he feels, back into a mission because it helps the story, not because it's why they started.
So pitch the story you can defend. Stephanie's example is a founder who invents a new part for a machine that makes pallets. Real customer pain, real opportunity, no mission story required. Telling investors that part will change women's health would be weird, because nobody would believe it. Know your audience, and be truthful about what you're trying to achieve. Some stories carry themselves: cheaper colonoscopies mean more people get screened for colon cancer, and more people survive.
Then decide what the mission costs you. Chris asked whether it's a mission if you'd change it to stay in business. Anthony's definition: a mission-driven company is run by a founder willing, in the worst case, to let the company die, because the mission matters more than whether the company survives. That's a high bar. Failing it doesn't make yours a bad business. It means you should pitch the business.
Hiring is where a mission story does real work. Chris read a 2026 figure from Harvard Graduate School of Education, Gallup, and the Walton Family Foundation: 79 percent of Gen Z, ages 18 to 29, want a job centered on helping people or making a positive difference. Anthony asked how much of Gen Z is unemployed. Chris still leads his hiring with what the company does for the world, not the salary and benefits he'd have led with ten years ago. Stephanie's reading of the number is sharper. Gen Z isn't demanding mission-driven employers. They want their own job to have a purpose, and they want to see how their work affects the value the company creates. Any business that can say who it adds value for, and why that matters, can offer that.
Don't expect special treatment from funders, either. Chris has watched impact and triple-bottom-line companies get treated differently, and over the past few years, at least as it feels to him, that wave has faded as the thinking gets absorbed. You still have to deliver returns. What used to be called a triple-bottom-line company is now just called a company.
Rob's answer holds up. Work out who pays and why they keep paying. Then tell only the impact story you'd defend in front of a skeptic.
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