Why Packback CEO Mike Shannon Says Evolution Fuels His Purpose Discovery
Packback Co-Founders: Kasey Gandham, Mike Shannon, Jessica Tenuta, Nick Currier
By Mike Shannon, CEO & Co-founder, Packback
For me, purpose evolved.
At first, I simply wanted to “be an entrepreneur.” My hunch was that, as an entrepreneur, I could do good in the world, but I didn’t yet have a concept of tying the product to a purposeful impact.
In pursuit of trying to “be an entrepreneur,” some of the ideas that made it into my college scrap notes included:
A brick & mortar coffee shop
An actual bookstore (Thinking the margins could be beat, I interviewed the campus bookstore manager during my sophomore year after reading Sam Walton’s autobiography.)
A late-night waffle stand (I imagined I could “feed” off the 1:00 a.m. Domino's Pizza line.)
A humorous college newspaper.
I eventually teamed up with my Packback co-founders while we were all still college students. We set our sights on the problems that we understood firsthand, which led us to the mission of lowering textbook costs.
(Spoiler alert: today the business has nothing to do with textbooks.)
When I’m asked what my personal purpose was in founding Packback, the answer is less glamorous than I’d like to admit:
Try to be an entrepreneur.
Maybe it was even simpler than that:
Do something to make my dad proud.
Reducing the cost of textbooks, for me, was simply a vehicle: a way to “be an entrepreneur.”
For four years, we hacked at the brick wall of “disrupting the textbook industry.” It was exhausting. Looking back, towards the end of that road I can see that I was personally suffering from a lack of purpose; I never truly had an intrinsic passion for textbooks. However, because I had no point of comparison— this being my first company—I couldn’t tell the difference.
Until we pivoted our business model entirely.
In 2015, we shifted our focus from textbooks to an online platform that allows for AI-supported, inquiry-based student engagement. We saw a real gap between student learning outcomes and the metrics available to measure student progress.
As we worked toward Packback Questions, my purpose evolved again—and kept evolving. At some moments in the nascent days of pivoting, I’ll admit that my truest purpose was:
Don’t let Packback go bankrupt.
That was a pretty good first purpose.
As our vision for Packback Questions came together, two aspects of this new model aligned with a deeper connection to my purpose:
Asking Big Questions
Writing Practice (in an environment removed from social media toxicity)
While I was never a straight-A student in college, I could spend hours on learning paths when fueled with intrinsic curiosity. Given that writing is one of the primary ways that we ask our big questions and communicate our ideas, I could connect the development of writing skills as a direct means by which to fuel our curiosity.
Packback’s formal “purpose statement,” written by my co-founder Jessica Tenuta at our first post-pivot off-site in November 2015, illustrated that new vision for the company:
Awaken & Fuel the Lifelong Curiosity in Every Student.
Still the company’s purpose statement today, it’s one I feel intrinsic alignment with, a north star.
That experience showed me that purpose can evolve.
Purpose can also be found.
I discovered that within each lane of purpose, there can also be a multitude of purposes fulfilled through a single medium, like building one overall company purpose at Packback.
Individually, I keep the following simple statement as a Purpose Vision:
Tilt the world towards good.
Knowing that I won’t be here long, and that I can’t take anything with me, my purpose is to leave the world better than I found it. I don’t need to be concerned about making a “dent” in my lifetime’s universe. A slight tilt—influencing the slope of the world’s trajectory, even in such a subtle way that nobody notices—can build compounding interest far beyond my tenure.
With that goal in mind, I can consider each channel of influence/leverage against that objective (effectively, OKRs). That opens the opportunity to discover multiple purposes within the same medium.
Let me give you one example—a few of the multiple levels of purpose within my role at Packback.
Back when I was in high school, then college, my impression of the business world was that it was a stodgy, dry place. All business, all seriousness. I thought that I had to choose between business or creative endeavors.
It was a myth that I believed to be true, so I can reasonably assume that others felt the shadow cast by that myth as well.
Our co-founders’ leadership platform within our own company offered a medium that allowed me to crack that myth, and that realization sparked a sense of purpose that helped shape our company culture. We had an office space, we had a network, and we had speakers and a microphone. So we launched an open-mic event. The medium of operating Packback had additional utility as the foundation for Makespace and thus added an additional layer of purpose to my time at Packback.
That opened the space for a new kind of Purpose Vision:
Bust the myth. Operate on a different creative blueprint. Hustling to make Packback successful also achieves the purpose of influencing a new model for a successful company.
To distill that down:
Why I take action can align with a purpose.
What I do can align with a purpose.
How I do it can align with a purpose.
Fast-forward again. Now I’m Logan’s dad. That new role creates another medium through which I live out my evolving sense of purpose:
The Why of my daily log-in to work takes on another component (financially, among others)—providing for a child.
The purpose of How I do it evolves as I consider the living example that my day-to-day actions set.
My relationship with the What evolves as I consider the educational experience Logan will have, which renews my motivation for our work at Packback (especially as Packback has recently entered K−12 education).
I’d love to have been able to sit here and explain “on day one, I had XYZ purpose…” But that hasn’t been my path. My purpose evolved, was found, evolved again, was reclaimed, and so on and so forth. That’s a cycle I’ve come to appreciate, and one I’m confident will continue.
We can call it entrepreneurship. Or maybe that’s just life.
Cheers to finding our evolved layers of purpose in whatever we do.
