You know, a lot of people are just interested in, in building a company so they can make money and get out. — Jack Dorsey

You know, a lot of people are just interested in, in building a company so they can make money and get out.

Author: Jack Dorsey

Insight: There's a real tension here that most people feel but rarely name. Sure, making money is legitimate—we all need to eat and build security. But there's something hollow about treating a business purely as a financial extraction machine, a thing you build and then abandon. It's the difference between raising children and running a factory line. The unstated part of Dorsey's observation is that when you're only exit-focused, you're usually making different choices along the way. You cut corners on culture. You optimize for quarterly numbers instead of long-term resilience. You don't invest in things that only pay off in five years. The business becomes a means to an end rather than something worth building well, and somehow everyone can sense that lack of genuine care. What's interesting is that the people who seem to build things that actually matter—the ones whose companies last and innovate and attract real talent—tend to be the ones who became curious about the problem itself. They got hooked on the puzzle. That doesn't mean rejecting money or success, but it does mean the money became secondary to something else. Maybe the insight isn't that you shouldn't want to profit. It's that the best outcomes often come when you're interested in more than just the exit.