Love for the work is fuel, and it has to be the right kind
A company takes years, and interest that fades after the first year will not carry anyone through the rest. The question is what, exactly, is loved.
Make sure the thing you are working on is something you love.
Advice to love your work usually sounds soft. From Brad Feld, a managing director at Foundry Group in Colorado who has invested in young companies for decades and co-wrote Do More Faster, a 2010 book of advice from the Techstars accelerator, it rests on a hard observation about time.
Building a company usually takes far longer than founders expect. Seven to ten years from start to a meaningful outcome is common. During those years there will be long periods when nothing seems to work: a product that does not catch on, a funding round that falls through, a key hire who leaves. What keeps people going through those periods is rarely the prospect of money, which is distant and uncertain. It is caring about the work itself. Founders who started a company because the market looked attractive often leave when it gets hard. Those who love the problem tend to stay.
Love also improves the work, and not only through effort. Someone who cares about a subject notices details others miss, follows developments in the field without being asked, and holds the product to a higher standard. Customers tend to feel that. Investors look for it too, because a founder who would work on the problem without funding is less likely to walk away when the funding gets hard.
The advice has limits. Loving a product is not the same as loving the business around it. A founder who loves designing games may hate running a company that sells them, with its payroll, contracts and customer complaints. Feld’s line does not distinguish between the two, and many unhappy founders discover the difference too late. It is worth asking, before starting, whether the daily work of running this company is something to enjoy or only something to tolerate.
Love can also blind. Founders deeply attached to their product can refuse to see that customers do not want it, and keep going long past the point where the evidence says stop. Affection for the work is a reason to persist through difficulty. It is not a reason to ignore data.
The strongest version of the advice pairs love with a market: work on something you care about that enough other people also need.