Silicon Valley playbooks are designed for a very specific story, one where you’re building fast, capturing value, and ultimately exiting on top of loads of money. The whole model assumes you’re going to extract as much as possible and then sell.

But extraction is not what nonprofits are about. It makes zero sense to apply a lot of the lessons learned at start-ups if you’re trying to create sustained change in people’s lives or communities. Mission-based organizations aren’t building to exit. We’re building to last, to deepen relationships over time, to stay accountable to the people we serve even when it’s inconvenient or slow.

When you take tactics designed for extraction and apply them to transformation work, you don’t just fail, you fundamentally betray what you’re trying to do.

I see this play out in really specific ways:

The startup world says “hire fast, fire fast”. Bring on A-players, maintain high performance culture that burns brightly. That’s great if what you want is to build a “hit it and quit it” unicorn, but mission-based work isn’t about assembling the high flying fastest team, it’s about building a team that reflects and understands the communities you serve, that brings lived experience and deep commitment, that’s willing to grow with you even when progress is messy.

I’ve also witnessed nonprofits try to implement “culture fit” hiring and end up with a team that all went to the same 3 schools (true story)! Unfortunately this can lead to an org that is disconnected from its mission, vision, and the very community it serves.

Other ways I have seen this play out are with metrics: tech companies optimize for things that scale exponentially, like user growth and engagement. But real impact doesn’t scale that way most of the time. What’s wild is that boards and funders are so used to seeing these kinds of metrics that they forget that oftentimes the most important work is slow, relational, hard to quantify, and uneven.

If you only measure what’s easy to count in the timelines of corporate structures, you might miss quantifying the transformation entirely.

It would be easy to keep the whole Silicon Valley playbook at arms length, but mission-based organizations can actually use some of what the tech world does well.

You Do Need Operational Rigor so you’re not constantly reinventing the wheel every time policy changes or funding challenges create chaos that burns your most dedicated people out.

You Do Need to Track Program ROI. You need to make hard choices about what to focus on because doing everything badly helps no one.

You need systems that don’t completely fall apart when one person leaves. Those things matter.

But you can’t just copy-paste the startup playbook and expect it to work, because the underlying assumptions are completely different. But to be frank, I think venture backed companies have a lot more to learn from learn from mission-based organizations than nonprofits have to learn from them.

What I learned from that lonely first summer as the ED at CWDevs was that I wasn’t wrong to care about efficiency or to want to create more impact. I was wrong to import an entire philosophy without asking whether it was designed for the story I was actually trying to tell. Now when I work with mission-based organizations, whether I’m embedded as a fractional Chief of Staff or doing the deep work of Narrative Organizational Assessment Mapping, I help them build systems that work for the game they are trying to win.

You don’t have to choose between being effective and staying true to your values. You just have to be really intentional about which tools you borrow and why. That’s harder than following someone else’s playbook. But it’s the only way to build something that lasts.