>I thought the typical goal of hackers and startups
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.
Lots of people have tried to capture this distinction, I'm sure I'll do a worse job here briefly than you can find around, but for me the tell is how people spend their time, and an attitude.
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.
I associate hackers as a group that startups wants to hire not as having similar philosophies. To me this site is a very successful marketing/recruitment tool and not some indication that YC follows the hacker ethos.
The point is that this represents a coöption of the term hacker by the venture capitalist community -- it's always easier to convince someone to accept less value as recompense for what they produce by convincing them that they are engaged in a noble or even a personally virtuous (see e.g. "guru", "rockstar") pursuit.
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.