How (and why) to craft vision, values, and mission statements for your startup

If a startup is a belief in how the world should work, values, vision, and mission statements describe what that belief is and how to make it a reality. These foundational documents inform everything a business does, and are a guiding light for employees and prospective hires.

Often, these statements about what your company does and what it stands for can be wrapped up in a short slogan. Slogans are shorter, punchier, and used for marketing purposes — but they should reflect your overall mission, vision, and values.

As such, crafting great values, vision, and mission statements is key to setting a business on the path toward success. In this post, we’ll explain what values, vision, and mission statements are, how they differ, how they’re translated into slogans, and considerations for founders when creating them.

A mission statement is an internal document that seeks to explain why a company exists. It’s typically one or two sentences long and comprised of three parts:

• What the company does
• How the company does it
• Why the company does it

The mission statement serves the purpose of focusing employees and encouraging them to find new ways to achieve desired business outcomes. The mission statement typically sets the tone for a company’s culture, values, ethics, and agenda.

Use case: Product strategy

A mission statement helps the entire company stay aligned on what to build (and, equally important, what not to build). As product teams look at new features, they should examine how each feature supports the company’s core purpose.

Here’s how to think about a mission statement at each stage of the company:

• Early stage: Prevents feature creep and keeps the MVP tightly scoped to the company’s mission.
• Growth stage: Guides prioritization so product teams work on features that meaningfully advance the company’s mission.
• Scaling stage: Ensures new product lines or expansions remain consistent with the company’s mission.

A vision statement, on the other hand, builds off a company’s mission statement by illustrating what the world could look like if the company accomplishes its stated mission. According to the Chamber of Commerce, a vision statement is forward-looking, aspirational, clear, concise, and strategic. It describes what your company wants to achieve, usually in the next five to 10 years. If employees can understand what the future they’re working towards looks like, ideally they’ll work harder to achieve it (assuming they’ve already bought in on the mission). In this way, the vision statement provides the organization with a common cause and enhanced sense of purpose.

While there’s no set format for a vision statement (some organizations combine a mission and vision statement together), most tend to eschew the particulars of how the business operates and lean instead into more abstraction and emotion to describe the impact the business could have on the world. Ideally, a company’s vision statement can be summarized in a sentence (as we’ll see in the examples further down).

Use case: Investor communication

A vision statement helps investors quickly understand the long-term goals of the company. They can envision what the future looks like when the startup succeeds — and why the opportunity is worth investing in.

Here’s how to think about a values statement at each stage of the company:

• Early stage: Signals ambition and market potential.
• Growth stage: Clarifies how the company plans to expand, differentiate, and capture a larger share of the market.
• Scaling stage: Reinforces confidence in the company’s ability to become a category leader.

A values statement outlines a company’s core principles, beliefs, and ethical standards. It guides how a business interacts with its customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

A values statement should complement the mission (what the company does) and vision (where it plans to go). The values statement explains how the company will behave along the way.

For startups, a values statement is often the cultural backbone. It might express qualities like integrity, creativity, or sustainability. In day-to-day operations, it should closely align with what the company stands for and why that matters. 

Use case: Hiring and team culture

A company’s values statement drives how the company hires, manages, and evaluates its people. It establishes behaviors and standards that the company considers most important.

Here’s how to think about a values statement at each stage of the company:

• Early stage: Helps founders hire the first few team members who will set the cultural tone for future hires.
• Growth stage: Provides consistent criteria for evaluating candidates and maintaining culture as headcount increases.
• Scaling stage: Ensures managers across departments reinforce the company values and prevents cultural shifts as the organization expands.

With those definitions in mind, it’s clear that what a company’s mission statement and vision statement have in common is that they both guide the direction of an organization. As such, they can (and should) help shape everything a company does, from product to process. The key nuance between the two is that a mission statement defines what your company does and why it does it (with respect to the immediate value and solution you’re providing), and the vision statement explains how your company achieving its mission could have a greater impact on the world. Both relate to a company’s core values and culture, and both can attract employees and investors — and keep them engaged, motivated, and excited.

However, a mission statement can only inform on the current status of your organization. The vision statement portrays what you believe your organization could become in the future — which may look very different than your current mission statement.

A company’s vision statement is aspirational and future-oriented, whereas a values statement guides the company’s day-to-day operations. A vision statement should define long-term direction, whereas values keep the company grounded and consistent. 

The two statements should complement each other as the company pursues its goals. A vision defines the company’s destination, whereas values define how the company travels along the way.

A slogan is a short, memorable phrase that communicates the essence of a brand, product, or company. Mission, vision, and values statements go a lot deeper, whereas a slogan is intended to capture attention. 

Slogans are often used in marketing campaigns, advertisements, and brand messaging. They can reinforce positioning or set expectations for customers. When done well, slogans are repeatable, and recognizable. (Think of Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan). 

Use case: Marketing and brand positioning

A slogan distills the company’s core promise into a short, memorable phrase. It reinforces brand identity across campaigns, channels, and customer touchpoints.

Here’s how to think about a slogan at each stage of the company:

• Early stage: Provides quick clarity about what the company does and why it matters (which is especially helpful when brand awareness is low.
• Growth stage: Creates consistency across expanding marketing efforts, which helps the company stand out in crowded markets.
• Scaling stage: Strengthens brand as the company enters new markets or launches additional products, ensuring that customers immediately recognize the brand’s core message.

Not sure where to start? Here are some examples of mission statements, vision statements, values statements, and slogans from companies.

Mission statement examples

As previously mentioned, mission statements are short, punchy, and cover what an organization does, how it does it, and why it does it. Here are a few examples of persuasive mission statements:

• Apple: “To bringing the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services.”
• Disney: “To entertain, inform, and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling.”
• IKEA: “To offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.”

Vision statement examples

While there’s no set format for a vision statement, most also tend to be short and punchy. Here are a few resonant vision statements:

• Shopify: “Make commerce better for everyone.”
• Google: “Significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible.”
• Patagonia: “Use all of our resources to defend life on Earth.”
• Nike: “We see a world where everybody is an athlete—united in the joy of movement.”

Note that these vision statement examples offer big, bold visions of the future, but abstain from explaining exactly how these outcomes will be measured.

Values statement examples

Values statements can often be found on a company’s careers page, since it wants to communicate what the company culture is like. 

Companies often have multiple values statements, each reflecting a different aspect of work or teamwork. These examples are one from a series of values statements on the company’s website.

• Zappos: “Build open and honest relationships with communication.”
• Airbnb: “We’re united in partnership with our community to create connection, which enables belonging.”
• Hubspot: “We choose courage over comfort. We take risks, stay curious, embrace feedback, and learn along the way.”

Slogan examples

Each of these slogans reflects part of the company’s mission, vision, or values. 

• Apple: “Think different.”
• Nike: “Just Do It.”
• Airbnb: “Belong anywhere.”

Great vision, values, and mission statements should temper ambition with realism and be broad enough to remain relevant as the company grows. Additionally, they should be strategically written so as to help employees focus on the task at hand (i.e., this is what we’re trying to accomplish) while motivating them for the future (i.e., this is what could happen if we accomplish what we set out to do).

Although we discuss vision, values, and mission statements in tandem — and while we noted earlier that some companies choose to combine the two — we recommend creating each one separately, allowing them to be their own individual thought exercises. These documents can be distributed together to employees and should work together, but it’s helpful to keep them broken apart for clarity and more immediate value. To that end, each can follow its own process to ensure that you land somewhere strong.

Here's how to write a mission statement:

1. Information capture: Write down who your company serves, what it offers to customers, and what makes it unique from other organizations in your market. Try to encapsulate all this information in a single sentence.
2. Refine and edit: With the bones in place, tinker with the language or write variations in an effort to craft something that’s both resonant and persuasive.
3. Collect feedback: Share the mission statement with people you trust (ideally within your organization) and incorporate their feedback into the final product.

Similarly, here’s how to write a vision statement:

1. Determine your goals: Write down where you want the organization to go, what problems the organizaton can solve if successful, and how that might change the world.
2. Be specific: Edit down your vision statement to make it as relevant to your organization as possible. Ideally, the end goal should be one only your organization is capable of achieving.
3. Collect feedback: Share your vision statement with internal stakeholders to determine if it resonates, and incorporate feedback into the final product.

And here’s what to think about as you outline your values statement:

• Identify the core behaviors and beliefs: These should guide how your team works, avoiding vague or aspirational language.
• Involve co-founders or existing team members: Look for common themes and ensure the values reflect your actual culture. 
• Compare your values to real scenarios: Do your values align with hiring, decision-making, and performance expectations?

As you work through both your vision and mission statement, remember to remain connected to your company’s core values. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. As such, consider how your company’s actions and vision connect with its core beliefs. Focusing on values can humanize the work of a business and endear it to customers and employees.

Kemal Didic, co-founder of Mango Puzzles, suggests crafting a statement like “We help X do Y.” This can help you align the decisions you’ll make with your purpose as a company. “This exercise is just as important for your own clarity as it is for your customers,” says Kemal.

Another important consideration here is to avoid buzzwords and jargon. The point of both the mission and vision statements is to be engaging, resonant, and clear. Overly convoluted prose or dull platitudes can dilute the impact of mission and vision statements and make them less accessible. This in turn makes it harder for them to serve their key purpose of anchoring your work and your team in a shared understanding of what your company is about.

Slogans can be tricky, since they’re used in a very public way. A strong slogan is both an art and a strategic exercise, since it needs to capture the company’s essence in just a few words. Someone writing a slogan needs a deep understanding of positioning, audience, and messaging. 

Because slogans are so publicly visible, they’re often created by marketing professionals. The process of crafting the perfect slogan includes:

• Core promise: Clarify what the company stands for and why customers should care.
• Brainstorming: Look at slogans that emphasize benefits, emotional hooks, or bold statements.
• Testing: Evaluate how the slogan differentiates the company from competitors, and whether it holds up against campaigns, channels, and stages of growth.

Vision, values, and mission statements should be in place before a startup goes out to hire or fundraise. While the founders might understand the startup’s vision and mission, it’s important to be able to convey it effectively to prospective investors or employees.

Once in place, vision, values, and mission statements should be revisited periodically as the startup scales. This ensures that each statement remains relevant and can continue to serve the purpose of guiding, uniting, and motivating stakeholders. A good best practice is to set aside time each year to review your organization’s vision, values, and mission statements.

A company should write a slogan once it has a clear understanding of its brand identity — including its mission, vision, and values — and knows exactly what differentiates it in the market. A slogan works best when the business has a defined audience and a consistent message to communicate. It’s typically created during a branding or rebranding phase, product launch, or major marketing push. The goal is to distill the brand’s essence into a short, memorable phrase that reinforces its positioning. In other words: write a slogan when you’re ready for a simple line that people instantly associate with your brand.

Keep in mind that your slogan may change over time as you refine your marketing. In 2025, Nike rebranded its 40-year-old slogan “Just Do It” to “Why Do It?” to appeal more to a Gen Z audience.

The process of creating a vision, values, and mission statement can in itself be valuable in that it calls on you to be thoughtful about your company’s purpose, and create alignment on what that means in the long term. But it takes ongoing work to make the vision, values, and mission a part of your company’s day-to-day culture and business, rather than just a few slides in your brand deck.

One way to ensure that your vision, values, and mission remain top of mind for the team is to make sure that you’re surfacing and resurfacing them with the team on a regular basis. Many organizations invest time and resources in ensuring everyone knows and understands the company’s vision, values, and mission by organizing regular workshops, holding seminars, and or sharing out visual assets (e.g., posters) that can serve as a constant reminder.

Beyond that, it’s also important to think about ways to measure the impact of your vision, values, and mission. While these statements are more qualitative than anything — and though they are lofty and ambitious — it’s helpful to find a way to weave them into your company’s day-to-day business operations. This is where objectives and key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) come into play. When planning seasons come around, take the time to reflect on which of your OKRs roll up to the company’s mission and vision, and what KPIs they can measure to determine if the OKRs are being met.

Vision, values, and mission statements are short, but their impact can be huge. Employees, investors, and customers want to know what a business is working towards and why it matters. Writing out great vision, values, and mission statements can truly move the needle towards a business realizing that mission and vision.