Halligan: Founder-CEOs should be evaluated on the 'LOCKS' framework

“I call it my lock algorithm. L is for lovable. And, you know, Steve Jobs, you would say is kind of rough and maybe not lovable, but he would inspire followership. You would want to follow him. And so could I envision a twenty-eight-year-old me graduating from business school going to work for this person? Would I crawl across broken glass? That's question one. Two is just obsession. Are they deeply obsessed with this problem? Did they, I'm a little negative on people who came up with this problem to solve six months ago and started a company. I like people with deep founder market fit. We've been thinking about it for a long time and have evidence in their lives of going deep down obsessively down a rabbit hole, because that's kind of what it takes to be a founder CEO. The C is something I wouldn't have thought of, but this is a Sequoia thing, like chip on the shoulder. Pretty much all of them have a bit, like a boulder on their shoulder, and I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder too, and the K is just for deeply knowledgeable about the domain, and so I kind of look for that. If I were to stick an S on it, I would say student.”

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