How important is the end goal to our best work?

One of the key elements to that for a founder and for pretty much any role, and I certainly would include this for any technical role, is your motivations. What is it that you're trying to achieve? Let me contrast some of the examples that I gave earlier.

I talked about earlier me caring much more about the algorithms and data structures. That was a motivator for me. And that was something that I cared about. And therefore that's, to me at the time, what my best work looked like. It was the thing that I was happy to step back and look with pride and to ask others to share in that sense of pride. And I contrasted that with how as a startup founder, you're pointing at different things, but underlying that is, what is motivating you? What it is that you're trying to achieve? And certainly for founders, this is the one thing that needs to be very clear. And, sometimes we express this in terms of the mission for the business and for a founder, that mission is completely intertwined with their own mission.