Should people join a startup primarily for financial upside or for love of the work itself?

Emilie Choi · Aug 23, 2021

The key hiring filter for a crypto company is finding people fired up about the mission and playing the long game rather than those there to make a quick buck

Because crypto is a form of money, it disproportionately attracts people excited about the money rather than the mission

42:32 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C

Satya Patel · Jan 30, 2023

The last decade's assumption that getting rich was table stakes for joining a startup was a delusion; people should join for the experience, the learning and the people, and expect only fair compensation

49:06 20VC: Homebrew's Hunter Walk and Satya Patel on Why $100M is Not Enough To Execute a Seed Strategy Today | Why They Decided not to Raise New External Funds | Where Are We in the Cycle & What is Truly F***** | Why Founders Should Take Secondaries Earlier

Ilir Sela · Aug 4, 2023

Financial outcomes are not what motivate him; he is unafraid of ending up with little

Growing up sharing a two-bedroom Staten Island apartment with the extended family, they had very little but life was awesome, and what he actually enjoys is the process of hard work and pain

Scope: still grants that financial security matters; personal, not prescriptive

7:14 20VC: Why "Hire Great People and Get Out of the Way" is Total BS, Why Your Upbringing Can Make You a Worse Leader & A Bentley, Two Nissan Cubes and Becoming One of Macedonia's Largest Employers; The Story of Slice with Ilir Sela

Elias Torres · Mar 21, 2025

People who join startups for the money should not do it — the right motivation is love of the game, and the financial outcome takes care of itself.

At every company he was part of he never calculated what he would earn; the appeal was creating, impact, customers and team experiences, versus the deadness of his IBM days where people left at 5pm not caring.

Scope: admits he may have been naive

40:22 20VC: Selling Drift for $1.2BN is the Biggest Failure: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company | Why Incumbents Are Slower & Worse Than Ever | Why the Most Valuable Companies in a World of AI Will Not Have More Than 100 People with Elias Torres

Eléonore Crespo · May 9, 2025

She is not building Pigment for financial outcome but to build a company that scales for the next thirty years, so the priority is getting the best people around the table.

The goal is a massive, enduring business rather than a personal financial result.

0:00 20VC: Four Traits of the Most Successful Founders | How to Hunt and Close Talent Like a Pro and Where All Founders Go Wrong | Lessons Raising $397M From the Best Investors in the World with Eléonore Crespo @ Pigment

Miki Kuusi · Nov 28, 2022

For Miki, building Wolt was never about the money — he turned down multiple acquisition offers, including one when broke at 26, because he wanted to see what the company could become

Different situations and stories mean different things work in different places; a piece of advice might apply 70% of the time and you may be in the 30%

Scope: includes his own advice

47:24 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin

Davis Smith · Dec 15, 2023

Entrepreneurs wrongly chase wealth; if they instead focused on purpose, on adding value to the world and on giving their teams a life-changing experience, everything else would work out

Focusing on money — how much can I raise so I can make as much as possible — is the wrong focus and ends up hurting them

20:11 20VC: Cotopaxi: From Selling $6M of Pool Tables to Scaling $150M in Revenues and Challenging Patagonia, Fundraising Lessons from 100+ Rejections & What Founders Do Not Understand About VC with Davis Smith, Founder @ Cotopaxi

Hunter Walk · Jan 30, 2023

Technologists focused on disruption should still know the history and shoulders they stand on, and should care about what they can create ahead of what that creation is worth

As a history major he values lineage; the Homebrew name comes from the Homebrew Computer Club hobbyists who met before they were entrepreneurs

57:16 Value creation and historical lineage over monetary worth

Akin Babayigit · Jun 26, 2023

Founders fetishize grandiose meaning and mission statements, and there is a widespread lack of genuineness around it

Most people are actually driven by money, or like him by being good at something and wanting to win, not by the mission on the wall

15:05 Most people are driven by money or winning not mission statements

Harry Stebbings · Dec 15, 2023

VCs need founders to be chasing wealth, because building a meaningful company has to translate into cash and liquidity

VCs are chasing an exit and returns

21:27 Vcs need founders driven by wealth outcomes to generate liquidity

Davis Smith · Dec 15, 2023

Rejecting personal wealth as a goal is compatible with VC ambition: eradicating extreme poverty requires building a multibillion-dollar brand, so he wants the same massive outcome a VC wants

A massive business generates the profits to change lives at scale and inspires other businesses to rethink the purpose of business; he personally has enough and lives simply

21:40 Purpose driven massive outcomes align with vc ambition without personal wealth motive

Craig Courtemanche · Dec 4, 2023

Mere interest in a problem is not enough to succeed as a founder; you have to love what you do

He endured years of strife and turmoil and would not have been able to sustain it without loving the work

9:01 Love not mere interest is required to sustain founders through difficulty

Palmer Luckey · Sep 28, 2020

Oculus's financial success was a happy coincidence of passion meeting timing, whereas with Anduril he deliberately picked an area where he knew a lot of money could be made

He worked on VR as a hobby for years with no money story until investors required one; with Anduril he set out to work on something he knew could succeed

5:02 Deliberately choosing a lucrative market can wor