Squiggly careers, planning and hiring purpose-driven people: Áine Kerr on entrepreneurship

Áine Kerr is an award-winning entrepreneur, board chair and broadcaster. She was co-founder and COO of Kinzen, which was acquired by Spotify in October 2022, and is now a director at Spotify, heading up its Content Safety Analysis team. She was also Managing Editor of Storyful, acquired by News Corporation. She is an accomplished broadcaster, a member of the Gaisce Council (overseeing the President of Ireland’s award for young people) and chair of The Shona Project. She is one of the five judges of The Pitch 2024 who will be deciding the ultimate winner on November 11 at Dublin City Hall.

Describe your career in three words… Squiggly. Purposeful. Unplanned. 

What’s one lesson you have learned in business that you wish every woman knew? Everything needs to start and end with your why, your purpose. When you become detached from your why – what gives you meaning in the world around you – it’s harder to refuel, to find the energy transfusions, to endure, to persevere. 

Running a business or navigating squiggly careers requires a recommitment to the why and purpose (and often suffering!) day in, day out. Our companies, projects, teams, careers, and indeed our personal lives, don’t move in straightforward lines of progress and forward momentum. Instead, we’re constantly pivoting, resetting, starting again and navigating change.

Your why is your stubborn vision for change and for impact, that teaches you the importance of patience and adaptability –  it’s what sustains you on the hardest days when you’re relying on your resiliency reserves. When you trust the end line, it’s easier to re-evaluate the startline and progress lines, and go again tomorrow, brick by brick, day by day. 

As a judge of The Pitch 2024, what are you looking for in a finalist’s live pitch on November 11? Founders with purpose and passion who can clearly articulate the problem to be solved, who know what their differentiator is, who can forecast the future potential for scale and growth, and who can demonstrate commitment to preserve, adapt, and learn. 

Do you feel your early training and career set you up for entrepreneurship and if so, how? I knew at age 15 that I wanted to be a teacher and a journalist – it was just a case of figuring out the sequencing, milestones, and timings.  

I did exactly what my 15-year-old self promised to herself – undertake an education degree that ranged from sociology to psychology and get life experience that would inspire my journey into journalism, where I operated first as an education reporter before later going into politics. 

Teaching and journalism may seem like massively contrasting careers but what they have in common is a love of information, knowledge and learning. Both crafts understand the importance of curiosity, of powerful questions, of leading by listening, and showing empathy and understanding. 

And those are probably some of the attributes that set me up for being an accidental entrepreneur – to have the ability to learn in and on the job by surrounding myself with people smarter than me who could teach me, who I could learn from. 

Do you believe the Irish educational system adequately supports entrepreneurial spirit and action? Increasingly, yes. The blend of Transition Year with its mini company module and placements, and opportunities like the BT Young Scientist, The Shona Project and the Gaisce Award definitely help young people unlock new interests and play to their super strengths. 

I love that my six-year-old’s math homework every week now has mentions of “data” everywhere! We’re showing kids from a very early age how math and science are tangible and relevant in their everyday lives.  

Something is starting to work in STEM, in our ‘see it, be it’ movement when there’s equal representation of boys and girls taking part in the BT Young Scientist every year. That’s very encouraging because they are the generation who are going to build the next technologies that can have real-world impact when it comes to health, climate change, media, and beyond. 

What is the most underrated quality essential for entrepreneurship in your opinion? Rightly, entrepreneurship is often associated with futuristic, creative, innovative, blue-ocean thinking, going where no one has gone before. 

But entrepreneurship also requires consistency when it comes to keeping the lights on amid the daily grind, doing what I’ve often termed the “unsexy plumbing” of building policies, procedures, systems, and processes when you’re starting and growing.

Every day in business, you’re trying to optimise the wins and endure the lows, but ultimately and consistently just work the plan, trust a process, and grind it out with attention to detail, speed and efficiency. Radical focus requires consistently doing the small things, the right things that get you further up the runway for takeoff. 

What defines a resilient leader or entrepreneur?’ A resilient leader is someone who is unafraid to start again, and again. Starting a business requires you to fall in love with a problem but to be honest [with yourself] when that problem definition is changing or disappearing, and to fail, pivot, reset inexpensively. 

The businesses that work sometimes aren’t the most innovative or unique. Sometimes they’ve simply shown the most adaptability in times of chaos, opportunity and change. 

The resilient entrepreneurs and leaders are those who constantly ask and answer the questions of: What’s the worst that can happen? What’s my Plan B, C, D, E, F?  They spend their time scenario planning, preserving their options, pulling different levers, being ruthless about the bigger goal and ultimately iterative and flexible about how they get there.

Is there any career advice that you were given but (thankfully) ignored?! The “act like a man” mantra to get ahead in business and boardrooms has been proffered by some. That might have been needed in the past by some of the women who burst through glass ceilings to make it easier for our generation to be our own selves. But our male colleagues have their strengths, we as women have our own and we should never forget the power of our own voice, lens, perspectives. Period. 

What’s the most valuable piece of financial advice you ever received? I reinvest a percentage of my salary every month into paying for a career coach, undertaking courses, buying books, paying for newspaper subscriptions and more. Having this discipline ensures there’s a continuous loop of constant learning, evolving, being alive to some of my blindspots.  

What has been your most proud moment in business so far? I’m proud to have helped bring two amazing Irish start-ups through acquisitions, and been able to declare success and put a stake in the ground for Irish entrepreneurship. 

But the proudest moment has always been hiring the people who are going to build the product, the team, the culture, the company. To have those moments where you can say to people: this is now your company. And then to see the people you hired get to hire their people and just constantly repeat the cycle of giving people a shot, a chance at something and then trusting in them, believing in them. Hiring smart purpose-driven people who care about the world around them is easily the best perk of business. 

And time and time again, if you trust those people and try to be as transparent as possible, you can build this incredible sense of togetherness that has real-world impact. 

Having a five-year plan – yay or nay? It’s important to be able to lob the ball and say to your friends, family, colleagues, peers, investors: See where that ball landed? That’s where I’m heading to, see you in five years! If you have the courage to lob the ball, you’re then accountable to your own ambition, your own sense of purpose and the impact you’ve defined for yourself in the world. 

It’s often guesswork, it requires you to be futuristic and predict the unknown. And you’ll constantly change the Sat Nav coordinates to get you there over the five years. Often, of course, the plan will radically change. But having some design for life and careers is important so we play our part in creating experiences, communities, and partnerships that get us onto a proactive footing, rather than falling into a gear that is always reactive, always a game of whack-a-mole. 

We have to harvest the crops we’ve already sown when we go to work every day, but we also have to sew the crops of the future or we risk arriving at barren lands with lost missed potential which could have thrived if we’d only figured out how to harvest and sew simultaneously. 

What’s your ‘go-to’ quotation for inspiration? “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” (from Facebook wall posters in its offices the world over) 

If you knew then what you know now, would you do anything differently? I started the second start-up at the start of my first and only pregnancy. Cue the mantra – if you want something done, ask a busy woman! And while I’ve no regrets about the manic task of running a business and rearing a little girl, plus answering a lot of other callings in life, I’m much more conscious now in my 40s than in my 20s and 30s about the importance of the energy transfusions, of refuelling, of being smart and disciplined about bookending the working day, of building boundaries at the weekends between work and home life, of finding the joy, of being here now in the moment and having gratitude for what is, than what could be. 

The Pitch 2024 is an IMAGE Media and Samsung partnership.

The final will be held on Monday, November 11 in Dublin City Hall when 12 finalists will compete to win a prize worth over €100,000 of Samsung technology, a bespoke IMAGE media and marketing campaign and mentoring from Bobby Kerr.

Learn more about the Samsung Galaxy Fold 6 in-store or online.