Hire Misfits, Not Missionaries

You’re recruiting wrong

The most popular maxim in Silicon Valley might be: “Hire missionaries, not mercenaries.” Coined by legendary investor John Doerr, an early backer of Google, Amazon, Twitter, and more, he argues that there are two types of people who work at startups. There are mercenaries, purely mercantile creatures that ruthlessly prioritize prestige, compensation, and career progression over company success.

And there are the elect. The holy ones that make Silicon Valley great: the missionaries. Missionaries are employees who wholeheartedly believe in the mission of a company. They will devote themselves to whichever cause their chosen business is proclaiming as its divine mandate. These are the SpaceX employees who want to go to Mars and will hang on until they get there. The Meta employees who will do whatever Zuck is telling them to do at the moment. These people will work longer hours for less pay—they are the ideal employee.

The “hire missionaries” advice was, for a time, pretty good. It attracted the sorts of people who were obsessed with space as kids, and this helped enhance their commitment for wherever the company was going, and however it was getting there. However, with all respect to John Doerr, I propose that it’s no longer a good idea to hire a missionary. Hiring a missionary today is a good way to have your company become sad, broken, and only able to get term sheets from VC funds in Ohio.

What changed is AI. The underlying anima of LLMs is jagged and rugged. These systems are probabilistic and the output is different every time. Missionaries, while committed, often chase inelastic goals—space or bust. This works in some industries. It doesn’t work when AI becomes the core technology of everything.

Now is the time to hire the misfit: the polar opposite of the mission-driven persona. Their career is weird and illegible. Their personality may be prickly. But if you can figure out how to work with them, they’ll accelerate your growth past anything you can imagine.

This is a big claim. Let me tell you why it's true.

The problems of divine work

From the ages of 19-21, I spent my time as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon church. I helped the good people of New Zealand get through some of the worst life has to offer: drugs, abuse, disease, and other crises. People tried to stab me, passersby in the street screamed in my face, and every moment was a grind. I worked 12 hours a day for two years straight with only Christmas and Mother’s Day off. And for this privilege, I was paid a total of 0 dollars. In fact, I used money that I had saved since I was 11 to pay for it myself. It was the best and worst and best experience of my life; it shaped everything about me.

As someone who was literally a missionary, the Doerr advice has always struck me as kind of funny. The missionary is great in some environments—like church, where the mission is clear. However, there are distinct idiosyncrasies that make people mission driven. And those same personality traits can end up harming companies during the age of AI.

Holy scripture

One of the strangest parts of Silicon Valley is the existence of myriad “playbooks.” These are best practices handed down between generations in the form of blog posts, content, and prototypical advice on things like Product-Led Growth. Unfortunately, despite obtaining the status of scripture, playbooks are rapidly becoming historical artifacts. They only work if a market is consistent. Like SaaS, which tends to work like SaaS every time. The margins are juicy, the revenue predictable. Eric Vishra, a partner at Venture Firm at Benchmark characterized it like this,

“By and large, SaaS leaders dropping into rapidly scaling AI-native co's are struggling. It is like dropping rural Germans into the middle of modern Tokyo.

The AI CEOs only know this pace, tech, sales cycle.. and can’t explain how these leaders should reframe. The SaaS people talk about quota capacity, quarterly roadmaps, and enterprise, which don’t mean anything to the AI CEOs and are generally irrelevant, at least for now.”

AI is such a paradigm shift that it breaks the expectations that have undergirded the last decade. A missionary, in their earnest desire to do the best they can, will follow the old playbooks to a T.

A misfit just doesn’t care about the playbook at all. They rely on curiosity over creed, and are continuously updating their belief system. The only religion they follow is one of exponential growth—who cares how we get there? It’s about solving the puzzle, damn the politics, damn the policy, damn the scriptures.

To be clear: This is a deeply annoying person to work with. They don’t accept what is “best practice.” This might have been the wrong attitude in the past when the holy playbooks kind of worked, but is really useful now.

Follow the prophet

When I came to Silicon Valley, I expected to find hackers, but I found a bunch of Harvard grads instead. They weren’t rebellious or disruptive. They were professional hoop jumpers who delighted in following the prophet’s (founder’s) commandments. Founders can’t get enough of these people. They are ferociously smart and competitive. In a world of softies, they’re professional glass chewers willing to put in the long hours to get the blessing. They’re missionaries, which means they are very, very good at doing what “you are supposed to.”

Misfits aren’t like that—at all. Their career will look like they put bingo balls with different jobs on them and kinda just picked things out at random. Took 12 months off to write a book? Yes. Got arrested at 16 for hacking into something they shouldn’t have? Hell yes. These are the kind of resumes that make a recruiter’s head burst into flames. They are confusing and would probably be auto-rejected by an AI tasked with handling cold emails. They’ll go to state schools or random private schools you haven’t heard of or no college at all.

They take a first-principles look at the world and question the structure of it. Why can’t they just sell it all and start over? Why shouldn’t they major in English? Books are awesome. Their life is oriented around figuring out what is right (for them) regardless of what school counselors will say.

Misfits are exactly right for AI because they don’t try and get a degree before they do a task—they just figure out how to do it with what they have. Similarly, LLMs allow people to tackle anything. A person can write code, create marketing copy, and design graphics without needing a professional degree.

The mission is technology

After I finished my mission, I went to Silicon Valley and did the startup thing for a few years. Some companies worked out! Most did not. When one of the losers I was at got shut down, I was connected with a very well-known VC who is now off writing multi-hundred million dollar checks. I told him I loved tech and just wanted to work on the coolest products possible. He blew up at me.

“How am I supposed to introduce you to companies with an answer like that? You have to believe in the mission! Like me: I just happen to have a passion for B2B SaaS and am crazy about these types of companies.”

I know, I know that seems like a fake-ass quote and a fake-ass story, but I promise you it happened to me. It exhibits the worst quality of the popularization of the “hire missionary” advice: Sometimes, the mission is just to rise up in their career. Seen through that lens, they’re not very different from the mercenary. “Being mission driven” has been co-opted by MBA types. Testing for missionaryhood is near impossible because people just lie in the interviews.

Maybe that guy was being honest. Maybe he really did just love saying the word “workflow” every day, but I’m gonna guess that his passion had something to do with software being the most predictable way to make millions.

Additionally, it remains difficult to know what the “mission” of most AI companies are beyond “let the GPUs rip and see what happens.” If we take the CEOs of the AI labs at their word, there will be 20% unemployment in U.S. in the next 5 years. AI could potentially remake our society in ways that are near impossible to imagine. “Disruption” isn’t necessarily the most compelling mission statement.

Misfits, God forgive them, don’t care that much about the long-term impact of AI at all. They are so compelled by curiosity, so driven by a hunger to solve things, that it overrides all other concerns. They don’t march unseeingly into an inelastic horizon of “saving the world”—they jiggle around their goals until something works. They want to see the number go up. This is different from financial motivation, though misfits love money like anyone else. If they have any sort of religion it is one of technology. They think tech is cool and want more tech. Nothing more, nothing less.

The 7 commandments of the misfit

Misfits don’t really care about the scriptures (playbooks), prophets (founders), or the mission (impact). Because of this, they can be hard to spot

If you look closely, however, there are a few key differences.

Loyalty: Misfits are devoted to craft, missionaries to the company

Learning: Misfits scrape ArXiv on Friday night, missionaries wait for lunch and learn in three weeks

Communication: Misfits dump raw demos into Slack, missionaries polish the all-hands deck

Conflict: Misfits spar openly, missionaries only disagree if a move takes them “off-mission”

Failure: Misfits dissect failures for fun; missionaries dread them as a faith crisis

Value Creation: Misfits deliver leaps, missionaries maintain momentum

Motivation: Misfits tinker for the thrill of discovery, missionaries march behind the mission flag

If you believe, as I do, that misfits are the future ideal tech employee, then you have to seriously update your hiring practices. For paying subscribers, here’s how you can find these people and convince them to join your startup with job posting examples, outreach strategies, and how to structure compensation.

How to find and hire misfits