Hackers and startups are two very different groups with very different ideologies and goals and incentives. No idea why you group them together. Some startups have no technical founders even.
>"change the world" and "make a difference"
Startups are businesses and like all businesses in the end they wish to make money. VCs, for example, are very clearly investors and not philanthropists. They are high risk, high reward businesses which means they need to change things to get those returns but in the end they are a business.
>How does selling to Visa accomplish those things?
It gives Plaid financial stability and long term platform for its technology. If its technology makes the world a better place then its continual existence does make a difference.
> Some startups have no technical founders even.
Hackers in the sense that I mean it have an innate need to understand things deeply, and a tendency to value achieving this directly (e.g. do something, don't just read up about it). As a result most hackers with any real talent will have achieved an unusually high level of expertise/mastery in at least one, often a few, technical areas. This is a result of having really spent a lot of time with it, in ways that may look "obsessive" to others.
This is by no means restricted to software. Another common characteristic is a tendency to take things apart (physically or virtually) to see how they tick.
Tech workers want to buy homes and go on vacations just like everyone else. That's a good thing. They had an opportunity to make a lot of money making banking services easier for everyone; that's awesome and should be encouraged.
Also, I question the general usefulness of startups created to pursue an exit in the first place. Besides there being often no point in entangling yourself with a service that's meant to be transient, the goals will be different too - the company will try to force hypergrowth by underhanded, and ultimately user-hostile means, vs. letting a thing grow on the strength of its usefulness. Myself, I strongly avoid dealing with any startup that I can smell was built for an exit.
In only one of those cases, did I join the company expecting an imminent-ish liquidity event. One hit me out of nowhere. Regardless of what you're planning on, and even if the dollar amount isn't that great, it's a huge rush, a lot of thinking about the possibilities. It would suck, at the very least, on an emotional level, to have that fall apart.
Incidentally, that company was also taken private during the dot-com crash, and I did make money from that, because the ESPP I was buying for <$1 got converted to cash at something like 3.5x the valuation. It wasn't much, but, again, I was young, so it seemed like a lot.
Is YouTube a failure? Is Instagram a failure? How about Github or Linkedin? There are reasons to remain an independent company, but there are also reasons that it might be better to be acquired. Besides the premium that the acquirer will pay, large companies can actually accelerate your growth while also insulating you from a lot of the pesky overhead of being a public company.
At least rappers have the honesty to say it's about that cash.
If you listen to VCs talk it is 100% about exit price.
That sounds like the goal of a non-profit, not a startup. What a founder says at a TED talk (which I admit can often sound like the former) shouldn't be conflated with the nuts and bolt conversations they have with their closest lieutenants and investors. Assuming we mean venture funded by "startup" the definition has always been growth oriented, highly risky and innovative through disruption.
> It's also kind of indicative of how small startup ambitions have become. Acquisition has become a measure of success, not failure.
Really? I'm surprised you think that acquisition is either a measure of success or failure in a vacuum. Wouldn't the terms and the specific deal be important than how a company exits? After all, there's a world of difference between an acquihire and a strategic merger.
If your aim is that everyone should have access to these tools then getting Visa to integrate them is a pretty good way to accomplish that - Visa is big enough that if they adopt something then pretty much every credit card will have to match it.
Also, I'm getting paid.
It's absolutely perfect to be passionate about customers/product/whatever. However, if one is constantly distracted trying to making ends meet the cognitive bandwidth is going to be spent on it rather than chasing the passion.
I care so little about "changing the world" or "making a difference". Those things don't pay the rent.
It's also kind of indicative of how small startup ambitions have become. Acquisition has become a measure of success, not failure.