Founders are terrible CEOs

You have to admire people like Larry Ellison or Bill Gates who have the bandwidth to lead a company from zero to large successfully. They have a very rare set of skills.

I have not read the entire underlying study behind the article but I feel the headline may be a bit misleading.

From the article:

"But founders’ poor success rate as CEOs also has to do with the kind of personality that’s compelled to start a company in the first place. People often start companies precisely because they want the freedom to run things as they wish—which sometimes includes poor managerial decisions."

This may be true for some founders but I'm struggling to see whether this represents a substantial sample size. My impression is that people often start companies because they want to go through the experience of starting a business and seeing it grow and succeed. Freedom may be a part of it, but this article seems to suggest it's a dominating variable that ultimately leads to the demise of the founder(s) which I'm struggling to see.

I agree, and my comment is not to diminish yours in any way.

But...

Perhaps it's confirmation bias, it seems more and more comments on HN have acknowledged the inescapable role of luck in the success of these leaders' ascent.

It's difficult to reconcile, though, because we all want to be in control of our own destinies. Articles that lionize the Ellison/Gates/etc. of the world just feed that "I can do it too" mentality.

How many people here actually do have the capacity to be one of these high-caliber leaders but never have the opportunity because the planets don't align just right?

Worker productivity and managerial efficiency are the metrics they use in the study.

From this I conclude that business school professors are terrible at picking success metrics.

> A founder is supposed to think about stuff that often competes with that, like making employees feel motivated or delivering value to customers.

Honestly, I think this explains why sidelining founders early has such a bad track record. They may not be expert managers, but they have goals consistent with building for the long term. (The ones who make it to successful companies, anyway.)

A lot of the horror stories from the dot com era are of visionary-but-unskilled CEOs being replaced by experienced executives from big 90s companies. And so management improved and waste was cut, but the company promptly became adversarial with its customers and even employees. Without the capital reserves and institutional power of BigCo, weak talent and angry consumers drove them into the ground. (I vaguely suspect this is why tech companies this cycle have been so slow to rationalize around perks - it's worth overspending on worse-than-cash offerings just to ensure you don't go too far the other direction.)

I've heard it said that at a certain size, companies stop being entities in a market and grow markets inside the company. Certainly, many large companies appear to view their employees and consumers as enemies. (e.g. Walmart's view on staff, EA's view on game buyers.) So CEOs who don't operate like that after winning are framed as 'bad' executives, while startups that bring in BigCo thinking too soon destroy all of their advantages.