Dec 1: Mission statement

This is the first post in the Fastmail Advent 2024 series. The next post is Dec 2: Thowback: security — confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Mission statements have a bad reputation. For good reason. They’re generally somewhere between aspirational goal and corporate bullshit: don’t be evil, think different, enhance shareholder value…

So anyway. We decided to do one:

Make email better

The very first page in our Notion workspace starts with that phrase, and then explains it:

Fastmail is a small company making a big difference.

We make email better for our customers by providing the email service that people are proud to pay for. And we make email better for the world by leading standards, open source, and advocacy work.

People who use our service know that the first item is true. Our customers are very loyal, for good reason. Sure, you can get email for free, if free is your only consideration, but our interface is smooth and fast, we have real humans staffing our support desk, and they sit RIGHT next to us. I am less than 2 metres away from the closest support agent right now.

Fastmail has its mission statement, and I have my own personal mission statement as well: “keep email open”. We had fully ⅓ of our engineering staff at the IETF meeting in Dublin a few weeks ago. We’re heavily involved in developing the standards that will keep email as the number one social network in the world, and we’re widely respected in the email industry.

I firmly believe that email is the electronic memory that we all need in a world where online content is changed frequently. I routinely find emails from 10 or even 20 years ago to remind me what happened then, and what I thought about it.

So there it is — Fastmail’s mission statement. We strive to live up to it every day. I judge myself as CEO, and prioritise our work, around meeting it. Creating a great product, and leading the world in making email better for everyone. I hope it comes through in every interaction everyone has with us, and you — the reader — agree with me that it’s how you see Fastmail as well.

See you tomorrow for the next post!