MISSION

We want to increase the freedom of money globally.

My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that as if I do not care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to us is building something that actually makes a really big difference in the world.

People do not care about companies. They care about connecting with each other.

OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. That means sometimes our products will not be optimized for short-term revenue.

We started this podcast because the best investing books shouldn't require an MBA to understand.

The way I think about Stripe's mission: if we can increase the GDP of the internet by even a tiny fraction, that's a huge deal for the world.

Arm the rebels. That's what Shopify does. We give superpowers to the little guys.

The mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. An open financial system is a human right.

We founded Robinhood because we believed that the financial system should work for everyone, not just the wealthy.

Making commerce easy for everyone — that was the idea from day one. Small businesses shouldn't need a finance department to take a credit card.

I built PayPal to move money. I built Affirm because how people borrow money is fundamentally unfair.

We will never charge a late fee. If you can't pay, the last thing you need is a punishment for being broke.

Money should move as freely as information. An email doesn't cost more because it crosses a border. Sending money shouldn't either.

We've saved our customers over $3 billion in bank fees. That's not our revenue — that's money people kept instead of giving it to banks.

Banks make $35 billion a year from overdraft fees. That's $35 billion taken from the people who can least afford it. We charge zero.

The best bank account is the one that doesn't punish you for being broke.

Every other corporate card wants you to spend more. We want you to spend less. That's either the dumbest business model ever or the smartest.

AGI is going to be the most transformative technology in human history. Getting it right is the most important thing we can do.

If powerful AI is coming regardless, the safest outcome is for it to be built by people who are genuinely worried about the risks.

We named the company after Aragorn's sword because it was broken and reforged. American defense innovation was broken. We're reforging it.

My mom worked in restaurants my whole childhood. Three jobs, no benefits, no delivery option. DoorDash is the tool she never had.

Grocery delivery isn't about convenience. It's about giving people back the most precious thing they have — their time.

Our software helps find terrorists. If you have a problem with that, you have a problem with national security.

Small business owners didn't choose to become tax experts. They chose to open a bakery or a law firm. We handle the payroll so they can focus on what they actually care about.

Before Glassdoor, the only way to know if a company was toxic was to work there for six months. Now you know before you submit your resume.

We handle the business of therapy so therapists can focus on the therapy. Nobody went to graduate school for six years to argue with insurance companies.

Sixty percent of therapists don't accept insurance. Not because they don't want to help — because the paperwork makes them want to quit. We eliminated the paperwork.

We don't compete with therapists. We compete with the emergency room. If we do our job, kids don't end up there.

Everyone talks about the mental health crisis. Very few people are building clinical infrastructure to actually treat it at the severity level where people are dying.

Therapists didn't go to school for seven years to spend half their time on hold with insurance companies. We handle that so they can do what they actually trained for.

Prior authorization was designed to reduce unnecessary care. Instead it became a system that delays necessary care. We're fixing that with AI that can read clinical evidence faster than any human reviewer.

I was CFO of Facebook and Genentech. I could have done a lot of things. But mental health is the biggest solvable problem in healthcare, and nobody was solving it well.

The mental health system treats everyone the same way: try something, wait six weeks, and if it doesn't work, try something else. We use data to skip the guessing.

Precision mental health means getting the right person to the right treatment the first time. Not the third time. Not after they've given up. The first time.

We donate a pair of glasses for every pair we sell. Not because it's good marketing — though it is — but because 2.5 billion people in the world need glasses and can't afford them.

I'm not a celebrity endorser. I'm a mom who was frustrated with what was available for my kids, and I put my time and money behind a solution. There's a difference.

I made Google Earth. Then Google Maps. Then Pokemon Go. My career has been about getting people to explore the real world through technology. That thread has never changed.

We want to make financial expertise broadly accessible and effective in helping people live the lives they want.

We want to create an open financial system for the world. That's a pretty audacious goal but I think it's achievable.

I started this company because I wanted to democratize healthcare. Not just access — understanding.

We're not trying to turn everyone into a day trader. We're trying to turn everyone into a saver who happens to invest.

We named the company Adyen. It means "start over again" in Surinamese. We wanted to rebuild payments from scratch, not patch the old system.

The financial system was built for 20 percent of the population. We built Ant Group for the other 80 percent.

Work about work — the status meetings, the email chains, the "who's doing what" conversations — eats up 60% of people's time. We want to kill that.

I left Facebook because I realized the biggest impact I could have wasn't building a social network. It was helping teams actually get work done.

The best phone for the planet is the one that already exists. We just need to stop throwing them away.

Fifty million tons of e-waste every year. That number will double by 2050. If that doesn't justify a company, I don't know what does.

A country that runs on oil is a country that runs on a countdown clock. We wanted to stop that clock.

Therapy shouldn't require a waitlist, a commute, and $200 an hour. We wanted to remove every barrier between someone and help.

Mental health is not a feature. It's not a tab in a fitness app. It deserves its own company, its own brand, its own category. That's what Calm is.

Brazilian banks make more profit per customer than almost any banks on earth. That margin is our opportunity. Every percentage point we shave off is billions of reais back to consumers.

Etsy isn't an e-commerce company. It's an economy. Two million sellers feeding their families because this platform exists. That matters more than the stock price.

We built the app to get people off their phones and into real life. IRL — In Real Life. The irony of using a phone app to achieve that was always part of the joke.

Metabolic dysfunction affects 88% of Americans. Eighty-eight percent. This isn't a niche. This is the biggest health crisis in the country and most people don't even know they have it.

We sold 2.5 million rings. Prince Harry wears one. Jeff Bezos wears one. But the customer I care about is the nurse working night shifts who finally understands why she feels terrible — and changes her schedule.

I wanted to democratize AI. I genuinely believe open-source AI is better for humanity than AI controlled by three companies. Whether Stability AI survives or not, the models are out there. The genie doesn't go back in the bottle.

I didn't build Starling to sell it. I built it to run it. There's a difference. Most fintech founders want an exit. I wanted a bank. A real, profitable, lasting bank.

Doctors are making life-and-death decisions with incomplete data every single day. Tempus gives them the full picture — genomics, imaging, clinical history — so the decision is informed, not intuitive.

I started ThredUp because my closet was full of stuff I never wore. Turns out 73 billion garments end up in landfills every year. That felt like a problem worth solving.

Germany is a nation of savers, not investors. We want to turn savers into investors. That is a cultural shift, not just a product.

The credit system in America is broken in a very specific way — it punishes people for being young, for being new to the country, for not having a history. Our AI fixes that.

The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. That sounds grandiose but every other AI company is just trying to sell ads or automate customer service.

I always tell new employees: don't think of this as a job. Think of it as a chance to solve a problem that affects a billion people. If that doesn't motivate you, this isn't the right place.

I grew up poor. I know what it feels like to be excluded from services because you can't afford them. KakaoBank exists because regular banks forgot about regular people.

DeFi isn't about replacing banks. It's about building an alternative for the billions of people banks won't serve. If you have a bank account and a credit score, DeFi isn't for you. If you don't, it might be your only option.

We built Polygon because Ethereum was too expensive for regular people. A farmer in India shouldn't have to pay $50 in gas fees to make a $10 transaction. That's broken.

Wall Street makes money confusing on purpose. My job is to make it simple. If a former JP Morgan trader can explain it in 60 seconds on TikTok, maybe it was never that complicated to begin with.

I get hate mail every day from men who are angry that I teach women about money. That tells me I'm doing something right. Comfort zones and wealth don't overlap.

I wanted to build a vehicle that could take you off-road without destroying the environment you drove to see. Adventure and sustainability shouldn't be opposites — they should be the same thing.

I started this at 26 with a PhD and a dream. Fourteen years later, we're delivering tens of thousands of vehicles. It took longer than I expected and was harder than I imagined. But we're building something that will exist long after the stock price noise fades.

The BYD Seagull costs under $10,000. A good electric car doesn't have to cost $50,000. If it does, you've failed at engineering. Our job is to make EVs affordable for everyone, not just the wealthy.

The green transition needs European battery independence. We proved the need exists. Whether Northvolt is the company that fulfills it — that question is now for others to answer.

I co-founded Tesla and helped create the EV revolution. Now I'm solving the problem we created: what happens to all those batteries when they die? The answer shouldn't be a landfill — it should be a new battery.

Brilliant is for people who think math is beautiful. If that sounds weird to you, try our first lesson. You might change your mind.

We built Brilliant because the way math is taught — lectures, memorization, rote problems — kills curiosity. We wanted to bring the curiosity back.

I grew up in Guatemala where access to quality education costs money most families do not have. Duolingo exists so that zip code does not determine what you can learn.

I grew up in a village in Turkey with no teachers. The internet was my classroom. Udemy exists so no one has to learn alone like I did.

The hype cooled. The stock crashed. But the mission has not changed. Animal agriculture is still unsustainable and we are still building the alternative.

Animal farming is the most destructive technology on earth. It uses more land than anything else humans do. The solution is not to eat less meat — it is to make better meat from plants.

I grew up on a farm. I love animals. But I also love burgers. Beyond Meat exists so you do not have to choose.

Education is the most powerful tool for changing someone's life trajectory. Everything I do through Emerson Collective starts from that belief.

We are not a milk company. We are a post-milk company. That distinction matters because it means we are not competing with dairy — we are replacing it.

One-third of all food produced globally is wasted. That is $2.6 trillion a year thrown in the trash. We are solving that with a thin layer of plants on plants.

We photograph the entire Earth every single day. If something changes on the planet — a forest burns, a dam breaks, a military base expands — we see it.

Self-driving cars are not about technology. They are about saving the 40,000 lives lost on American roads every year. Everything else is a footnote.

Africa has some of the most talented software engineers in the world. Nobody was hiring them because of where they were born. We changed that.

We built ElevenLabs because AI speech sounded terrible. We wanted it to sound human.

The private markets are opaque by design. We're trying to bring transparency to a system that resists it.

Medicare is broken. Seniors deserve better care, not just cheaper plans.

Sustainability shouldn't be a luxury. It should be the default.

My brother and I built this company because we're gamers who believe digital ownership matters.

We don't just want to be a bank. We want to be the financial platform for the 100 million Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

If you have $500,000, Wall Street gives you a wealth manager. If you have $500, they give you an ATM fee. We're changing that.

From ride-hailing to manufacturing. Two completely different businesses. But the mission is the same: move India.

I started Mapbox because humanitarian aid workers needed better maps than Google could provide.

Overdraft fees are a regressive tax. Current eliminates them. That alone is worth building a company for.

I spent 25 years in traditional banking. I saw how banks profited from punishing low-income customers. I started Varo to fix it.

We've advanced cash to 10 million members. No interest. No credit check. Just a bridge between paychecks.

We want to increase the GDP of the internet by making it easier for anyone to start a business.

Our mission is to solve intelligence and then use it to solve everything else.

JUST Egg is in 30,000 stores. GOOD Meat is in restaurants. Two paths to the same destination: no animal suffering.

Every enterprise has thousands of employees doing things a bot could do better. We free them.

Shopify exists to arm the rebels. Every independent merchant competing against Amazon is a rebel, and we give them the weapons.

We built Robinhood for the people who were locked out of the financial system. That mission doesn't change because of one bad week.

Now everyone can fly. That was not just a tagline. It was a promise to 600 million Southeast Asians who had never been on a plane.

Farming is a $400 billion industry in America alone. It runs on handshake deals and information asymmetry. We're fixing both.

Solve intelligence, then use that to solve everything else.

Every child in the world deserves protection from preventable disease. Price should never be the barrier.

Electric vehicles should not be luxury products. They should be affordable for everyone.

There is a lot of knowledge in the world that has never been written down. It lives in people who have spent years getting good at something. Quora is trying to surface that.

The best answers to the world's questions already exist in someone's head. We just needed to build the place to find them.

Local businesses are the backbone of every community. If you help people find great ones, you are creating real economic value.

Skype is not about technology. It is about making human communication more affordable and accessible.

We are not trying to make money. We are trying to make sure the internet continues to be a place where people can be in control of their own experience.

We do not want to be the company that monetizes knowledge. We want to be the institution that preserves it.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That is what we are doing.

The mission of financial inclusion isn't a soft goal. Two billion people don't have a bank account. That's a solvable problem.

If you're going to work on something for the next decade, it should be something that matters. For me, that's financial access.

A company without revenue can't pursue a mission for very long. Commercial success and safety research are not enemies.

We stop breaches.

Zuck has always believed that connecting everyone on Earth was a mission so important that it justified any action necessary to accomplish it.

We make medicines that poor people can afford. That is the whole point.

Our goal is to cultivate world-class Chinese enterprises and support world-class Chinese entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are the best tool humanity has for solving its biggest problems.

I want to help build Southeast Asian globals, meaning companies that were built in Southeast Asia but are global names.