founder CEO

“This is another classic founder-CEO mistake, is offering, you know, a dramatic upside. Paint a great long-term vision, but be really pragmatic about what you can achieve in the coming quarters, so you underpromise and overdeliver consistently.”

“If you're a founder CEO, your job is to propose a path and then Rely on the board to help you course correct. So one side of the error is not coming in with a plan. Got a problem. If you're going to propose it to the board, you know, you're going to get a plan…”

“I watched a lot of founders You know, they would evolve and they would say, I'm more of a creative guy. I'm going to step back from this and let somebody else take over. And I would always think, you know, that's kind of a cop out.”

“Not being clear about the level of agency they'll have. Meaning, a founder CEO is gonna be in the details of all the shit, and that's good. And some people expect, you know, complete agency calling the shots as a product leader, and they will fail.”

“In the early days of a company, the replacement move is more likely to fail than succeed nine times out of 10 before the company's got a certain amount of, like, stability to it.”

“Founder CEOs are very undercompensated. Like the go forward comp for a founder CEO today, once you, let's say you're there for over four years, your go forward comp is probably five X lower than if they hired an outside CEO.”

“A founder CEO with some managerial limitations usually performs a lot better than an excellent, a reasonably good manager with no founding DNA.”

“If we're aiming for these great outcomes and nothing else matters today in the B to B world, Then if the founder CEO is out, I'm out because there's no hope in B to B. This is just my view. If the founder CEO is out, I'm out.”

“I did analysis of all the B to B IPOs. Okay. Of the IPOs. 90% still had the founder CEO as CEO, and as near as I can tell, all but one had an elective step down, ok?”

“What you don't need in this kind of situation is generic business skills. What you need is massively specific knowledge and skills and courage to make the changes that you know you have to make. And that is where a founder's advantage.”

“If the belief is that the CEO should then never get compensation ever again, it's completely flawed logic. You want to give people who chase really big upside by creating really big things, the potential to continuously have that really big upside because it a…”