Missionary Accountants

One of my least favorite pieces of advice about startups is that founders have to be passionate about the problem they are solving. Actually, it is deeper than this - they must be missionaries! Ok, we admit that there are mercenaries, but apparently they’ll always lose to the missionaries. This is, frankly, weird and I think mostly a way to convince founders that they’re inadequate. To make this point, let’s use a strawman: the missionary accountant.

This doesn’t actually have much to do with accountants - who often love what they do and are good at it because of that interest. But love isn’t what we think of when we think of “missionary.” And I also think that the vast majority of founders working on (AI) accounting startups are not, in their heart of hearts, missionaries about the particulars of accounting. I’ll grant you that people are into all kinds of things I might find unusual (kombucha), but I’ve yet to meet someone in that position who qualifies as a missionary.

Oh sure, founders will tell great stories about freeing accountants from hours of mindless work or about building a huge company that leverages AI and does all kinds of interesting things through the act of building a massive accounting company. But that’s beside the point.

Passion and missionary-nes aren’t the necessary starting conditions. The question isn’t even whether or not you have these things natively for the problem at hand. The question is whether or not there is something inside of what you’re doing or in the goal you are trying to achieve that allows you to outwork competitors and convince investors to give you money and customers to give you even more money.

That’s hard to do. It requires odd blends of charisma and pain blindness.

But notice what’s missing from that requirement.

Nowhere in there is “deep, abiding love for payroll categorization” or “lifelong obsession with B2B SaaS retention funnels.” The people who actually pull this off are generally motivated by an unstable mixture of very different things: ambition, competitiveness, fear of irrelevance, a chip on their shoulder, a desire to win, the thrill of building something that shouldn’t work but does, and yes, sometimes a sense of mission. Sometimes.

Mostly, though, they’re driven by whatever will keep them in the game long after sane people tap out.

What actually moves the needle

If you strip away the founder mythology and look at what consistently shows up in successful companies, you don’t find “missionary purity.” You find:

• Relentless iteration on product and distribution

• Sharp insight into a system other people underestimate

• Unusual tolerance for risk and stress

• Skill at assembling and motivating a team

• A nose for money - where it is, how it moves, who has budget, who will pay for what and when

• Timing and luck - and the ability and interest to ruthlessly exploit them when they appear

The usefulness of mercenary traits

This is where “mercenary” qualities, which sometimes get written off as somehow inferior, are underrated.

Ambition, for instance. Extreme, slightly embarrassing ambition. The kind where you want to win so badly that you don’t care what you need to do. Where you want your name to be remembered for an extremely long time after you die. That’s the fuel that makes you sit through the 50th investor rejection in a week and go pitch another.

To make ambition work, you also need competitive drive. Plenty of founders are animated less by “serving customers” and more by “I refuse to lose to whoever is currently ahead.” You see this when two companies, competing for the same customer, pull all nighters to ship features that had been stuck on the roadmap for months. That’s about wanting to win.

And yes, wanting to make money is a hell of a driver. Startup culture likes to pretend otherwise because it money sounds crass. But there’s a reason talented people leave safe roles for absurdly risky ones: asymmetric upside. Stock options are not an act of devotion. They are a bet that your suffering might, in some universes, translate to never worrying about rent again.

Back in hedge fund world, we used to say “money isn’t the goal, it’s how you keep score.” Money is pure that way. Measurable across industries and time. It’s not the only metric that matters, but it’s the one the broader world understands. “I built this because I want to be rich” doesn’t sound noble, so it often gets laundered into “I’m deeply passionate about empowering X.” But the original impulse still counts, and it still drives behavior.

There’s also types of motivation that don’t fit cleanly into either bucket:

• People who are obsessed with puzzles

• People who can’t stand bureaucracy and build companies as a way of brute-forcing reality into a shape they prefer

• People who are addicted to intensity and see startups as the highest concentration of it per unit time

• People who deeply want some other thing for which they need lots of money/power/influence and want it at the speed that a successful startup can provide

None of these require “missionary” belief in a particular problem space. They just require that the work be the hardest, most leverageable way to indulge that obsession.

What we talk about when we talk about missionaries

The missionary/mercenary dichotomy persists because it is useful.

It is useful for investors because saying that they back missionaries sends a number of useful messages:

1. We back people who dream big

2. We back people who will endure pain

3. We back people who can build a culture that can attract great people

And it is, for sure, useful for founders to be missionaries. But I like to think about this less about the internal motivation than about the other side of what missionaries do: they convert followers. They find ways to convince OTHER people that what they’re doing is right, big, inevitable, too good to pass up.

It is absolutely true that the market is crowded and competitive. Being ambitious isn’t enough, neither is wanting money. You need to convince other people that they should do things that are quite possibly against their short term interests in the service of a long term and unlikely vision.

That’s where the missionary thing comes in handy.

Go forth and…

If you have an idea, and you think it is good, and yet you feel vaguely inadequate because you don’t have a sacred calling to revolutionize dental practice management or warehouse robotics, don’t worry.

You can build an extraordinary company because you love the act of building, or the intricacy of engineering, or because you hate bureaucracy, or because you want your name on a building, or because you get irrationally excited by gross margin. The market doesn’t care. History doesn’t care. Your employees don’t really care as long as they believe you’re going to do something fantastic with them. Your customers definitely don’t care.

It does not matter if you see yourself as a missionary or mercenary. What matters is if you’re willing to do everything needed to win.

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