Caring about the work and the customer, and what it cannot supply
The accelerator Cohen co-founded exists because the rest does not come naturally. That is the most useful way to read his line.
Love what you do and who you do it for. The rest will come naturally.
TechStars, which David Cohen co-founded in Boulder in 2006, runs on the assumption that very little in a young company comes naturally. Each program takes a small group of startups for three months, surrounds them with mentors who push on their plans every week, and ends with a day of presentations to investors. It is a structure built to force things that founders tend to postpone. Reading Cohen’s sentence next to the program he helped design is the clearest way to see what he probably meant by it.
The first half is the valuable part, and its second clause is the one usually skipped. Loving the work is common advice. Loving the people the work is for is rarer and more practical. A founder who genuinely likes the customer will call them without being told to, sit through their complaints, and notice the small annoyance that becomes the next feature. The research that other founders schedule reluctantly happens as a matter of course.
The pattern shows up in companies built by members of the group they serve. Etsy was started in 2005 by Rob Kalin, who made furniture and wanted a better place for makers to sell. The early site reflected an insider’s sense of what sellers needed, and its growth came from a community that felt understood. Stack Overflow, built by programmers for programmers, shows the same effect. Care for the user shortened the distance between a problem and its fix.
There is a second audience inside the phrase. Co-founders and early employees are also people the work is done for, and a founder who likes them will explain decisions, share bad news early and notice when someone is close to burning out. Teams that feel looked after tend to stay together through the rough first year, which is when small companies most often lose the people they cannot replace.
The second sentence is where the line needs a correction. Pricing does not come naturally, and neither do distribution, cash flow or hiring. Pets.com was popular enough to become a household name, and its sock puppet mascot got its own balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; the company was liquidated in November 2000 because it sold heavy goods below cost with expensive shipping. Enthusiasm for the product and the customer did nothing for those numbers.
Love can also blind a founder. A person who adores a product will read polite interest as demand, and will keep funding a project long after the evidence has turned. The same attachment that makes customer calls easy makes bad news hard to hear.
So the most useful reading keeps the first sentence and treats the second as encouragement rather than a forecast. The care supplies the motivation to do the unglamorous work for years. The work itself, from pricing tests to collections calls, still has to be done deliberately, which is exactly what a three-month accelerator is designed to make founders do.
The sentence appeared under Cohen’s name in 2011; no essay or talk of his carrying it could be found, so its original setting is unknown.