INTERVIEW
what you care about, then you can arrive at something that’s consistent for you.”
organisation but what you value–then you can answer questions easily. If you know
“If you have decided what is important for your company–not details of the
School and Credit Suisse, which researched 22 entrepreneurs who had successful exits. Yet 21 out of 22 were depressed after the event. “It’s not only common, it’s normal,” he says. This is a challenge for anyone, since few of us instinctively know what makes us happy. “This is touchy-feely stuff that founders
don’t like. They just want to write code, but if they’re going to build a company and not like it afterwards–and in fact the data shows you almost surely won’t – well, that’s kind of dumb. What’s the point of entrepreneurship if you’re going to build a job that you don’t like, or a job that you resent?”
SETTING CLEAR GOALS Knowing your goals is useful as self-care for founders, who by virtue of their calling will
often work extremely hard, which leads to the real risk of burnout. “If you’re not clear on what your goals are,
or if you have the wrong ones because you’ve set it for someone else... You’ve read TechCrunch and you think success can only mean a huge fundraising round or a unicorn valuation. That may not be what makes you happy and fulfilled, but you may think that that’s what you should think. And so, then you work on this company, designed for a goal that you don’t want. Now, there’s no way that can end well,” says Cohen. The value of knowing goals also holds true
for companies as well as for founders, Cohen says. A company with a clearly-stated mission will have principles that determine what it will and won’t do to achieve that goal.
20 INNOVATION IRELAN REVIEW
“If you have decided what is important
for your company–not details of the organisation but what you value–then you can answer questions easily. If you know what you care about, then you can arrive at something that’s consistent for you,” Cohen says. It also helps to avoid another common pitfall for start-ups, of solving a problem that too few customers need. While a start-up is small, there doesn’t need
to be a formal process of preparing a mission statement. It might be two founders who simply agree on the direction of the company. But even that exercise prepares the start-up for when it scales, and those considerations grow accordingly. “If you have 30 people and you don’t know what the culture is, how in the world are you going to hire the next 30 people
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