404: Purpose Not Found. Why Crypto Companies Can't Explain Why They Exist

Having spent eight years in crypto, including the last two at Safe as Head of Governance then VP of Growth, I've noticed that organizations across the space struggle with similar challenges. These writings share the patterns, frameworks, and insights I've gathered from operating through multiple cycles. Think of them as field notes.

Thanks to Yitong Zhang, Azeem Khan, Matt Bartlett, Valko, Marta Cura and Dennison Bertram for their insights and feedback.

One month into my role as VP of Growth at Safe, I kept noticing the same pattern across different meetings. Whether we were prepping for conference presentations, pitching to partners or onboarding new hires, each person was describing what Safe does differently. Our engineers talked about multisig wallets. Our BD lead about account abstraction. Our ecosystem team about smart accounts. Technically, they were all right, but we sounded like three different companies.

That’s when it hit me: we were solely explaining what we are doing, not our why. So I started revisiting our mission and vision statements.

Vision and mission statements are something almost every organization has. However, they often sit unused. Like the organization’s values pinned to the top of an all-hands Notion template or a north star slide buried in onboarding decks. They rarely feel actionable. A clear indicator of this disconnect is if no one quotes your mission when pitching your company.

Our official mission statement read like a product goal: “to establish smart contract wallets as the default means for interacting with web3”. It was a clear instruction, possibly measurable and well-suited for a product strategy, but it didn't explain the project’s underlying purpose.

What I found is common in many organizations at different stages of maturity: a purpose statement that is too narrow, tied closely to product features instead of long-term direction. This is especially true for spin-offs and growth-stage projects, where the project developed out of a different purpose or has been evolving over time.

Think of your purpose as the layer above your company strategy, which then informs your product roadmap, go-to-market approach and other strategic decisions. Don't get hung up on whether you call it vision, mission, purpose, or 'why statement'. Different frameworks use different terminology. The important thing is that whatever you land on is clear, your team gets it, and it actually influences how you work.

Why crypto companies struggle with this

I’ve noticed something across the crypto space: web3 is incredibly bad at expressing its why. Most projects are born from technical innovation or market opportunity. The result? Technical statements that could apply literally to any crypto project.

• "The elastic chain - a verifiable blockchain network secured by math"

• "Extreme paralleled performance, superscalar pipeline for the EVM"

• "The first modular blockchain network with shared security"

These aren't purposes, they're crypto technical jargon. And when actual purpose statements exist, they often lack the specificity needed to differentiate, essentially becoming indistinguishable from the overarching mission of crypto itself.

I get why people are skeptical about mission and vision work. I've been very critical about it myself. It always felt like corporate kumbaya to me. Purpose work feels fluffy when you're trying to ship features and hit growth goals. Most purpose statements end up as meaningless corporate speak anyway, the kind of thing that gets pinned to Slack channels and promptly ignored.

But here’s what I’ve learned: the bigger you get, the fuzzier it gets. This so-called purpose drift expresses itself in two ways.

The effects of purpose drift

External: If you don’t know why you exist beyond your current product features, every conversation becomes a custom job. Every new hire orientation. Every sales pitch. Every interview or podcast. You tend to talk a lot about what you are doing and sound interchangeable with competitors.

Internal: Without a shared understanding of purpose, teams drift in different directions. People optimize for different metrics, prioritize different features, and tell different stories about what success looks like. But you're asking yourself, isn't that what OKRs are there for? Yes, but even the best OKRs are incomplete. They can't anticipate every decision you'll face. Purpose underpins what objective and metrics you choose in the first place and gives you the clarity to challenge them when they stop serving your purpose.

Done well, a Why isn’t a tagline. It’s a compass. And if you’re not careful, your What, i.e. your product, starts drifting from your Why. First just a few degrees. Then over time the difference becomes noticeable. Until one day you realize you never really uncovered your Why and have just been iterating on the What.

How we uncovered our purpose

There are many frameworks out there. We leaned on Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” framework. It gave us a structure that avoided wordsmithing and focused on meaning. The framework breaks down into:

• Why: The core purpose or belief that drives an organization. It answers the question "Why should anyone care?".

• How: The guiding principles or processes that bring the Why to life. This is about differentiation and unique strengths.

• What: The actual product or service delivered. It's the result of the "Why" and "How" in action.

The combination of your Why and How creates your unique fingerprint, especially since so many projects often offer a similar What. This is your real differentiator.

To uncover our purpose we had two possible workshop approaches:

1. Short version: A 60-minute session with founders, focused on initial story-sharing and principles. We used this to surface early ideas.

2. Full version: A longer workshop open to more stakeholders (a 4-hour format), using story-driven methods to uncover the Why. This would have involved (depending on your org size) 10–20 cross-functional early team members. We prepared but ultimately didn’t run this. This is best to do in-person around an off-site.

Both workshop formats center around lived stories. You look into the past to see how everything aligns, which then educates the future. This is crucial because Why is usually discovered not created. The key is asking the right questions to uncover your organization’s contribution and impact: “What made your team proudest?”, “What specific contribution did your organization make to the lives of others?”, “What did this contribution allow others to on to do or to be?”.

If you don’t prompt these personal stories and just start with a bunch of words on a blank FigJam board the risk is high to end up with aspirational slogans that make purpose statements feel so empty. By centering on lived stories you properly articulate what was already an intuition.

The challenge is finding the right level of abstraction. Too specific and the statement risks becoming obsolete as the product evolves. Too vague, and you end up with something like “make the world a better place” (fans of the TV show Silicon Valley will recognize this one).

So I reached out to founders from projects that had just raised funding or gone through major rebranding. People who had recently wrestled with these same questions. One of them was my friend Yitong, Founder of the governance platform Agora, who had just closed their round led by Haun Ventures. He was fresh from articulating his own company's vision to investors. Drawing from his journey from early Coinbase employee to founder, he shared his take on vision statements being too broad and lacking specificity: “[Your purpose] might be too high-level. This is the ethos of the entire space, not uniquely ownable by Safe. Coinbase or Optimism might have the same vision." He explained the core problem: "If you're generic, you always have to provide context. You'll always have to add 'by doing...'“. Drawing from his early experience at Coinbase, he pointed to Brian Armstrong's early vision of "growing the crypto economy". It didn't immediately resonate with everyone because Brian always had to elaborate on what that meant. The vision should strive to be self-explanatory.

The following structure helps strike the right balance for the purpose statement: “to [contribution] so that [impact]” prompt. It forces clarity of intent and connection between action and outcome. It’s a guardrail against both feature lists and empty slogans.

Let’s look at how a few well-known companies outside of crypto have used a strong Why to anchor their actions and identity.

Southwest Airlines
Why: “To democratize air travel and bring freedom to the skies”
How: Low cost, excellent customer service, fun and friendly company culture
Not: Cheapest airfare

Patagonia
Why: “To build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis”
How: Environmental sustainability, high quality materials, advocacy for conservation
Not: Make the best clothes

IKEA
Why: “To create a better everyday life for many people”
How: Democratic design (stylish and functional), cost-consciousness, self-assembly, sustainability, customer experience
Not: Make the most affordable furniture

And when the purpose is not clear, the consequences are just as telling. Take Kodak. They invented the digital camera in 1975 but their purpose was so tied to film that they couldn't embrace their own innovation. Their identity was "film photography," not "helping people capture memories." While competitors built the digital future, Kodak clung to their old technology until it was too late.

The difference is obvious when you see it. Compare generic crypto marketing with this powerful brand video from my friends at Tally. When Dennison and his team know their Why, every piece of content flows naturally from that core understanding.

Testing your purpose in the real world

Finding your purpose statement is only half the battle. The real test comes when you put it in front of people, both inside and outside of your organization, and weave it into everything you are doing.

We shared our first draft with our investors, partners and founders from other crypto companies. Just as important: your purpose needs to be lived internally. It's not enough to have a nice statement if your team doesn't use it to make decisions. The real test is whether it changes how you work, what you prioritize and how others talk about your company.

When is the right time to work on this?

Too early and it's a distraction from building product-market fit. There's not enough collateral and learnings to enshrine a purpose. Too late and you'll feel that initiatives might feel disconnected with downstream effects rippling through everything you build. Product innovation might stall because teams can't evaluate new opportunities against a clear purpose, go-to-market campaigns feel disjointed, marketing messaging doesn't seem aligned with what you're actually building.

For us at Safe, several factors converged to revisit our purpose statement: Two years after the spin-off from Gnosis in 2022, we had launched our token in 2024 and were rapidly scaling both our team (approaching 100 FTEs) and ecosystem. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape was shifting, protocol developments like EIP-4337 and EIP-7702 were commoditizing account abstraction and other projects like Coinbase launched their own smart wallets. It became clear we couldn’t keep defaulting to “multisig” or “smart account infrastructure” as our identity. We needed a purpose that could rally an entire ecosystem around a shared belief.

Key takeaways

Purpose isn't corporate fluff if done right. It can be a competitive advantage and a guiding light, especially in crypto where everything changes fast and everyone is solving the same problems.

A few takeaways from doing this work:

• Your founders have to buy in. You can't discover a purpose that goes against the founder's vision. Start there or don't start at all.

• Stories beat strategy sessions. The why already exists in the moments your team felt proudest. You have to uncover it.

• External validation is crucial. We thought we were close, but external feedback from other leaders revealed blind spots we wouldn’t have caught internally.

The organizations that survive crypto's cycles aren't the ones with the most funding or even the best technology. They're the ones that know why they matter beyond the current hype. Your technical innovation got you started. Your purpose will carry you through everything that comes next.

What's your organization’s purpose statement? Reply and tell me if it’s actually useful in practice. I read every response and will share the best insights in future editions.