Founder CEO

“Your message, your narrative, your story comes from, especially if it's a founder CEO, it is them. It's not just like a thing they say, it is who they are. That the company's built off of that, and the purpose and the why you are doing what you're doing comes …”

“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…”

“Only a founder can do that. Because if you're a professional CEO who's employed, that's, you can't survive that.”

“This whole new world is much better for founder CEOs, because to be a founder, you have to have an original idea, and original ideas are interesting by nature.”

“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.”

“It's that feedback thing. Like all of the CEOs are building their teams. And so many are like, I have a co-founder that runs product and engineering, but I need that co-founder to kind of step aside and be the CTO and the thinker and the labs person. And I nee…”

“When you are a general manager at a large company of a division, you're not a financial center. Somebody else is doing the financial plan. In the startup, you know, the founder CEO has to be a financial center.”

“Your job is not to be one of those buffers. Your job is to preserve that intensity at its highest possible level and let the buffering happen somewhere else.”

“Even if you look at the successful founder CEOs, after about a decade, most of them leave. And in my mind, it's actually for this very reason, because being a large company executive is different.”

“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?”

“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.”

“It is much better To frame whatever it is you want to talk to them about or your recommendation under an existing umbrella of what they already care about, of values they already have, of ways that they already think the business should be run.”

“If you're more of a founder CEO, And you're going to have your quirks, and you're going to have your obsessions, and you're going to have all these things that founders often have. You need an org structure that reflects you.”

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

“This is where I think founder CEOs do have an advantage. They have the kind of moral authority of like, I started this company, and this is what I believe, and this is where we're going.”

“You start Founder mode. You're sort of default that because there's like, you look, you realize pretty quickly, like nothing gets done in this company unless the founders are literally doing it by hand. Then you scale and you're like, you get, you know, a lot …”

“And the CEOs that seem to build the greatest value are those who are typically founders because they're willing and able to be authentic because they weren't hired by the board. It's their business that they built. And so they're willing to be authentic. And t…”

“We found for every Bezos or Hastings, there's dozens of examples we've encountered of these setups where a founder can actually run a company off the rails because the idea proved to be flawed. And you can imagine these scenarios where the founder has a track …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We used to think teams are important. Of course, they're important. But I think I'm back to over indexing on one alpha female, alpha male equivalent, because I don't think you can distribute that vision and mission.”

“I think when to involve the founder CEO in a project is really important. And the short version, I think that works the best is almost like a U curve where the X axis is time and the Y axis is level of involvement. I think you want to get the founders, you kno…”

“One of the things that's unique about founder CEOs relative to like a professional CEO is you do have this extra chip of moral authority that lets you shake things up and keep the startup feeling like a startup even when you are at scale, and one of the ways y…”

“If you're the founder CEO, you don't get to work with, you know, another CEO who's 20 years more experienced than you in real time, so you have to kind of go outside the company for that.”

“The thing I came away with, Realizing is just how much agency, particularly founder CEOs have that they just don't use, you know, they're always like hemming and hawing and wringing their hands and acting like they're tied down by this or that. And the reality…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“Founder CEOs, by the way, kind of, if you look at them as a cohort in public companies, they outperform Professional CEOs.”

“I think it's important for the product organization, even though it's very small, to report directly to the founder CEO. Sometimes I see it tucked Under the CTO, and obviously that can work too, but I feel like it's a better way for the founder to stay involve…”

“As companies get bigger, go public, they're larger, they bring in professional managers, and the founder, CEO steps out. They generally don't do that, right? They generally try to not do that definitional work, because they're trying to minimize loss, and not …”

“I do think that being a parent is maybe more important, right? But I actually think it's easier than being a founder CEO.”

“As founders, as founder CEOs, Eight and a half times out of 10, we underprice and underposition, ok?”

“If you haven't built the sales team yet, and you are the founder CEO, you should be doing sales. So that's the first thing you got to do. Do not try to hire people. Do not try to do SDR. Don't do any of that. Go out and sell. And look and learn the sales cycle…”

“There is no division, and especially if you're a founder, CEO, you and the company are essentially the same, and even if the focus, let's say, of the stories are on the personal issue, you Guess what? Your company is going to be mentioned in every single one o…”

“Founder CEOs should be fluent in all aspects of their business, and financial fluency is just as core as anything else a CEO knows, since their financials, and I don't mean just knowing cash burn, represent the state of their business and are something they sh…”