Most businesses exist to earn revenues and profits, but it can take something else to help make them successful.
Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to believe that people who started companies just to make money didn’t usually succeed. “Sometimes people come to me and say, I want to start a company. And I say, Why? They say, Oh, I want to make lots of money. I say, Forget it. That’s not a good enough reason,” he said.
“Most people that have started companies because they want to make lots of money, I haven’t seen very many of those succeed. The ones that succeed are people that come, sometimes they don’t even want to start a company, they just have an idea that they want to get out, expressed out into the world. And oftentimes they have to start a company because nobody else will listen to them,” he said.
Jobs seemed to be saying that it was better to aim to create a product or service that would make its mark in the world, and change people’s lives for the better. If the product or service managed to do that, the company would end up making money anyway — it would be a happy byproduct of adding value to the world.
On the other hand, if someone started off a company with just an aim to make money, it was — counterintuitively — harder to make it. It’s possible that founders who’s motivated only by money are less resilient than founders who care about a mission, and can give up in times of adversity. It’s also possible that companies that are mission-driven make better products than those are are more focused on the money, and end up making more money. Steve Jobs, for his part, cared quite a bit of Apple’s mission of creating the best consumer products in the world — he even had his team sign the early Macintosh computers, much like artists sign their work. And with Apple now being the most valuable company in the world, his obsession with his mission did end up making him and his company plenty of money as well.