Minus One Mission Before Startup: Gokul Rajaram’s Playbook for Founders
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Dec 11, 2025 
Gokul Rajaram, an esteemed operator and investor with a legacy at Google, Meta, and DoorDash, shares invaluable insights for founders. He emphasizes the importance of passion and personal connection in choosing missions, highlighting the need to truly understand customers by working within their environments. The conversation also explores how unstructured time can foster creativity, the growing role of AI in startups, and the necessity for multidisciplinary founding teams in this new tech landscape. Gokul calls for deep curiosity among founders to drive innovation.
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Start With A Mission, Not Momentum
- Figure out a mission before starting a company and ensure it matters to you personally.
- Avoid founding a startup just because you want to start one or because a friend asks you to join them.
Personal Friction Creates Lasting Companies
- Authentic problems that founders experienced personally tend to scale into lasting companies.
- Market-size reasoning without personal connection usually lacks the authenticity needed to survive hard moments.
Go Native With Customer Research
- Go work a week or two inside the customer’s environment to truly feel their pain before building B2B products.
- Use immersive, go-native research rather than surface interviews to shape product decisions.