I'd suggest that the kind of people who get things started are often not well adjusted to the kind of guard-labour that's so often typical of management and C-level roles.
Founders are terrible CEOs
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Re: Founders are terrible CEOs
#12To the early stage startup founders out there who read this and think: "Hey, from today I think I'll try to become a better manager, let me go pick up that management skills and MBA book" Please don't. Just be yourself. While working on a startup I had somehow decided that I "need better management skills" when it was barely a small startup and I should have been focusing more on product and product only, I read too…
> let me go pick up that management skills and MBA book
If a founder were going to devote time to management skills, I wonder what the most beneficial topic would be?
My first two guesses are a decent guide to hiring (if one exists), and an HR guide to crisis management. CEO-style leadership is impossible in a startup, so it seems like hedging against crisis is the best bet. If you can slightly lower the odds of a bad hire or internal schism, that's probably higher-value than any marginal improvement.
I'd definitely be interested to hear other thoughts, though: whats the best rapid improvement available?
Re: Founders are terrible CEOs
#13The one kind of people who aren't named in this article: investors. Ben Horowitz of A16Z explained why A16Z prefers to invest in founder-led companies.
(...)
The macro reason: that’s the way most of the great technology companies have been built
(...)
Professional CEOs are effective at maximizing, but not finding, product cycles. Conversely, founding CEOs are excellent at finding, but not maximizing, product cycles.
(...)
Innovator’s requirements – what does it take to find the product cycle?
So where did Jobs get this “founders courage” and what is it? In addition to general brilliance, we see three key ingredients to being a great innovator:
1. Comprehensive knowledge
2. Moral authority
3. Total commitment to the long-term
Great founding CEOs tend to have all three and professional CEOs often lack them. Here’s why.
(...)
Re: Founders are terrible CEOs
#14You 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 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" mentali…
Playing on your point of luck - I recall reading in a biography of Gates that his mother was on a charity committee with the exec at IBM that was tasked with outsourcing development of an OS for the IBM PC. Anyway, they got the contract, provided DOS to IBM - and compatible vendors - and the rest is history.
We don't know - of course - how much that pre-existing relationship influenced IBM's decision and we don't know if Microsoft would have had the explosive growth they did without that contract, but it definitely looks like the stars aligned.
Re: Founders are terrible CEOs
#15You 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 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" mentali…
Sure luck is present, but there are people that are just good at it and would probably succeed regardless. Gates, Musk and Jobs come to mind.
Re: Founders are terrible CEOs
#16To the early stage startup founders out there who read this and think: "Hey, from today I think I'll try to become a better manager, let me go pick up that management skills and MBA book" Please don't. Just be yourself. While working on a startup I had somehow decided that I "need better management skills" when it was barely a small startup and I should have been focusing more on product and product only, I read too…
You certainly should not become an ass: become a great leader. That is very much different from being a CEO (though a CEO could be a great leader).
You can probably google and find as many books about leadership as you want, but my personal recommendation would be to just grab Extreme Ownership[1], assuming you can deal with the fact that his lessons were learned in the Iraq war (although they apply just as well to business).
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs-eboo...
Re: Founders are terrible CEOs
#17Well, explain why Apple crumbled when Steve Jobs left, flourished until he died, then began to crumble again.
Re: Founders are terrible CEOs
#18To the early stage startup founders out there who read this and think: "Hey, from today I think I'll try to become a better manager, let me go pick up that management skills and MBA book" Please don't. Just be yourself. While working on a startup I had somehow decided that I "need better management skills" when it was barely a small startup and I should have been focusing more on product and product only, I read too…
> let me go pick up that management skills and MBA book If a founder were going to devote time to management skills, I wonder what the most beneficial topic would be? My first two guesses are a decent guide to hiring (if one exists), and an HR guide to crisis management. CEO-style leadership is impossible in a startup, so it seems like hedging against crisis is the best bet. If you can slightly lower the odds of a ba…
Assuming that you are working with smart people, they follow you NOT because you read a leadership book and run some good leadership tactics on them. They follow you because they "choose" to believe that you know what you're doing in the context of your startup. Remember, they are smart people. And many smart people have strong bullshit detector.
People followed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs even though they were assholes not because they were "great leaders", but these smart people chose to believe that these founders had a great understanding of the landscape and can execute.
Therefore in my experience the most helpful books were those that gave me insights on how the world around us works since that helps with your world view. It's always great to have a higher level perspective.
For example, you could have looked at the chatbot fad last year and think that chatbots are the future, and went all in. Or you could have thought deeper into why the fad was taking place and work on a deeper problem. This type of ability is what attracts smart people to work with you.
This is only possible if you have a deeper understanding of the world. So read more philosophy and science books and more books that give you a better understanding of the world, than shallow business books.
Re: Founders are terrible CEOs
#19I'm not sure the market (weighted by market cap) agrees with the title.
Re: Founders are terrible CEOs
#20I'll fix it...
"Some" Founders are terrible CEOs of "Some types of companies"