Before you start the next company - an antiguide
When you start a new company, hit the ground running before you launch.
Don’t waste your time thinking about what your business is for, or why it matters, or what practices and principles will guide how you operate your business. Instead, adopt every assumption prevalent in your industry. A lot of businesses in your industry had already adopted them without questioning. Why shouldn’t you?
Since you may need one on your website, it’s fine to get someone to craft a glowing mission statement. But that’s the end of it. Don’t internalise it. Don’t bother yourself with how that beautiful mission will breathe into the day-to-day priority of the company.
Just do what everyone else is doing. Hire the way everyone else does so. Sell your products like everyone else. Treat employees like almost every other company does. Let everything else come ahead of your company’s mission. You know doing these will hurt your culture someday, but who cares. Someday may never come - until it does.
If you can’t wait to measure your progress, here is how you know you are doing this successfully; each time the rubber hits the road, let the company serve your interests and opinions as the founder, rather than the ‘mission’ and higher purpose it can inherently serve.
Like many entrepreneurs before you, talk about the idea your business is in service of. But run away from confronting the other questions that come with this idea: “how will you know if you’ve succeeded?”, “if you can only measure one thing, what will it be?”, “who is this business really for? who benefits largely from it - is it the founders, some other people who benefits long after the founder is gone, or who, exactly?”, “what’s your financial goal for the business?”, “what kind of financial value are you creating? who are you creating this value for? How long will it likely take? And what are the sacrifice and risk involved?”
If you don’t have answers to these questions, all hope isn’t lost. Your investors, board members and everyone else can answer these questions for you, as long as it matches their own incentives and goals.