Purpose becomes the real startup engine.
Bogotá, May 2026. Arsen Tomsky, founder and CEO of inDrive, has warned that one of the most common mistakes among young entrepreneurs is building a company around revenue alone. His message is direct: a business needs a solid purpose capable of sustaining discipline, resilience and daily motivation beyond short-term financial gain.
The advice comes from the origin story of inDrive, a mobility platform born in 2013 after a local crisis in Yakutsk, where taxi fares rose sharply during extreme winter conditions. The company’s model emerged as a response to perceived unfairness, allowing passengers and drivers to negotiate prices directly instead of depending entirely on fixed tariffs imposed by traditional operators.
That origin matters because it gives Tomsky’s argument operational weight. Purpose, in his view, is not a decorative slogan but a strategic force. It defines the problem a company is trying to solve, the community it wants to serve and the internal energy required to survive uncertainty.
For young founders, the warning is especially relevant in a startup culture often dominated by valuation, funding rounds and rapid scaling narratives. Money can accelerate growth, but it cannot replace the deeper logic that makes a project defensible. Without purpose, a startup may win attention before it earns legitimacy.
inDrive’s trajectory shows how a local pain point can become a global business when the underlying problem is clear. The lesson is not romantic; it is managerial. Strong companies do not begin only with ambition. They begin with a precise injustice, an unmet need or a friction that the market has failed to resolve.
Tomsky’s message reframes entrepreneurship as more than personal success. The real error is not wanting profit, but mistaking profit for direction. In a saturated digital economy, purpose is not the opposite of growth; it is what keeps growth from becoming empty.
Detrás de cada dato, la intención. / Behind every data point, the intention.