HAZEL SAUNDERS BUSINESS MAY 1, 2026
Brooks Sherman on Why Mission-Driven Founders Often Struggle to Build Commercially Viable Businesses
There’s a failure mode that shows up, predictably, in startups built around a social or environmental mission The founders care deeply about the problem They can articulate the urgency, attract early believers, and then, somewhere between the pitch deck and the rst real revenue conversation, the business model falls apart
It’s not because the mission was wrong, but because the company forgot it was a company.
Brooks Sherman
, a strategy and business development professional whose work sits at the intersection of climate, technology, and media, has watched this pattern repeat often enough to believe it deserves a more honest conversation “I have a lot of sympathy for mission-driven founders, because the problems they’re trying to solve are real and urgent,” says Sherman, who holds an MBA
in Sustainable Innovation from the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business. “But urgency is not a business model. And the gap between caring about a problem and building something commercially viable around it is wider than most people expect ”
The Mission Trap
The pattern tends to start with a compelling insight. A founder might see a gap in how clean energy reaches underserved communities, how sustainable agriculture could scale with the right distribution model, or how a particular technology could cut emissions in an overlooked sector The insight is often correct The problem is real. The early response from accelerators, grant programs, and impact investors reinforces the belief that the idea has legs.
But commercial traction requires more than a validated problem It requires a product that someone will pay for, a unit economics model that holds up under scrutiny, a go-to-market strategy that accounts for the messy reality of customer acquisition, and a team that can execute across all of those dimensions simultaneously. Mission-driven founders sometimes treat the mission itself as a substitute for one or more of those requirements, as though the importance of the work should be enough to carry the business forward. It is not, and the companies that survive long enough to actually deliver on their mission are the ones that gure this out early.
Consider that because there is no real market need for what they’ve built That’s a nding that has held stubbornly consistent across CB Insights post-mortems for years In Sherman’s view, mission-driven founders are especially vulnerable to this trap, because the pull of the problem can crowd out the discipline of asking whether anyone will actually buy the solution.
The Tension Between Purpose and Viability
Drawing on his capstone research as well as strategy and business development roles with earlystage climate and tech companies, Sherman has seen the tension between purpose and viability play out up close He describes a recurring dynamic where founders resist certain commercial decisions because they feel misaligned with the mission, even when those decisions are necessary for survival.
more than 9 out of 10 startups fail Sherman
“There is a version of mission-driven thinking that becomes almost self-defeating,” says “A founder will avoid a partnership because the partner isn’t perfectly aligned on values, or delay a product launch because the solution doesn’t address every dimension of the problem Meanwhile, the runway is shrinking and the window for market entry is closing The mission doesn’t survive if the company doesn’t survive.”
In 2024, 966 US.-based startups shut down
The stakes are real. , a 25.6% increase over the prior year, according to data from Carta Shutdowns rose across every funding stage, suggesting that the problem isn’t just early-stage naivety but a structural failure to build durable commercial foundations.
Climate tech felt this acutely: funding fell for the second consecutive year in 2024, dropping 40% year-over-year, with high-pro le bankruptcies underscoring how quickly promising companies can unravel when the commercial infrastructure isn’t there.
This is not an argument for abandoning values or pursuing growth at any cost It is an argument for disciplined prioritization, for recognizing that the most impactful thing a mission-driven company can do in its rst two years is stay alive and nd a repeatable revenue model.