As part of our ongoing series about marketing technology companies, let's focus a bit on the phenomenon of entrepreneurial passion. From our experience working with hundreds of startups over the years, we recognize that there's a certain archetype common to entrepreneurs.

In my first job as a newly minted engineer, I worked for Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and entrepreneur just 10 years after he got his bachelor's degree from MIT. Ray envisioned a day when we would speak to our computers and we were working to make that outrageously ambitious idea become a reality, ultimately producing the first commercially viable speech recognition systems.

I've invited three Rainier clients to help me articulate from their own founders' perspectives just what it is that makes people who start companies so unique. The following is our conversation:

Steve Schuster (SS): Along with raw intelligence, entrepreneurship clearly demands a level of passion that is just not found in the general population.

Isaac Thomas (IT), founder of VeganNation: Most of us go through life, we have all these ideas, all these different things that come to us but an entrepreneur knows that visualizing and having an epiphany is not a random thing. We get them for a reason.

Michael Weissman (MW), founder of SYNQY: Running a company is difficult and dealing with the challenges of startups is a unique experience that only a few have the grit to tolerate.

IT: The way industry works, there's always a better way to do things. If I have an idea, it comes for a reason and I have to act on it.

SS: What is that drive that makes entrepreneurs take it upon themselves to take action? In my nearly 40 years of working with entrepreneurs, I have never, ever heard a company founder say that their main goal was personal wealth creation. Instead, they talked about their frustrations with the status quo, with big problems that needed fixing and the vast majority spoke in bold, visionary terms about changing a particular part of the world.

MW: Why do I do it? It's not for the money, it's not. We do it because we see an evil in the world. And that evil in the world that we live in today is called Internet advertising.

Seth Noble (SN), founder Data Expedition, Inc.: In the last 20 years, think about how much the Internet and computing has changed the world. And then realize that almost all the data that is involved in that is going over technology that's been the same for 50 years.

SS: 50-year-old technology? He's not impressed with that.

IT: For an entrepreneur, it's extremely important to always remember that first spark because that carries so much energy because on that spark, we really build everything that we're doing.

SN: And over the last several years there's been a tremendous acknowledgement that hey, this is a problem. We're running our whole world economy on a 50-year-old technology.

SS: Entrepreneurs always have origin stories that not only drive them to start companies, but which are the foundation of their business mythologies that ignite others to join them and share their vision.

IT: I was actually on a cycling trip through the Alps.

SN: This goes back many, many, many years to when I was at Caltech doing research in the expert systems lab of Dr. Fred Thompson.

IT: And in middle of the Alps there is no vegan options.

SN: One of the big limitations was trying to get video going. This is back before webpages, before the Internet was really a big thing.

MW: Why don't persuasive pieces of content show up when the customer's actually interested in it in the place that they're interested in?

IT: What the world is missing right now is a platform geared towards positive impact, a global platform uniting conscious consumers.

SS: Entrepreneurs often express some visibly powerful emotions like outrage, frustration, and impatience with the way things are, along with a vision for the way they think things should be.

MW: The Internet advertising business is one of the most corrupt businesses in the world today.

SN: We had people from major companies like NCR, which no longer exists, telling us, “Oh, the Internet will never work for that. It has to be dedicated commercial networks.”

MW: In order for advertisers to reach consumers they're having to do more and more nefarious things. And that's really, it just hurts our spirit. We don't think that that's the right way the Internet should be.

SN: Yeah, the guy was kinda right, it sucked. I was like, “There's got to be a better way to do this.”

SS: There's got to be a better way.

MW: We eliminate the fraud. We eliminate the criminality. We eliminate the customer experience problems that advertising causes. And if that's the only thing we ever do, I think that we did a society a wonderful thing.

SS: These expressions of passion are incredibly powerful and I think they give us some real insights into the outlier worldview shared by entrepreneurs.

IT: The possibilities are enormous.

SN: The idea that software was really intellectual property and that the algorithms themselves were something that had value hadn't really been around before. It really got me thinking big, thinking, “Okay, well, what does this really do for the world?”

SS: It's so clear that the three company founders with whom we've been speaking each possess a clear vision for fixing the world, along with the realization that they own the responsibility for the changes they envision. You could see it in their faces. You can hear it in their voices and in their words. These entrepreneurs are not just creating corporate entities. They are very much on a mission.

SN: And it became this thing that now has customers and people around the world using it and doing cool things with it.

MW: We think that if we can make this a global change in behavior, we have really, really helped the world. And that's what drives us.

SN: It's all just kind of grown out of that need to do something that has been neglected for a very long time.

IT: I don't even need coffee to get me going throughout the day. I just I'm so passionate about what I'm doing.