[slyall]

He certainly couldn't do many of the technical guy's jobs as well as they could. Even if he'd run the whole thing by himself 5 years earlier he had not kept up with the new systems when everything had grown by 10x.

Even for relatively simply things like helpdesk jobs he could just "make it so" since he was the CEO (eg just give customer a credit) rather than having to go though the normal procedures but his technical knowledge was still out-of-date there.

He wasn't the nicest person in general. The problem was that he assumed he could jump into any situation and was as expert as any other staff member. So he'd start telling the network guys what to do to solve something (and trying to login to the routers) despite having virtually no idea how the routing protocols used on the network worked.

The problem was he assumed that any employee only knew a subset of what he knew, so that employee's only value-add was saving him time, not any expertise.

Something like: "I know your job better than you do, now get out of my way so I fix the problem quickly and get back to important stuff that you don't understand"

[ryandrake]

> The problem was he assumed that any employee only knew a subset of what he knew, so that employee's only value-add was saving him time, not any expertise.

Wow, if I didn't know any better, I'd bet we worked at the same company! However, my guess is that the above attitude is commonly found among type-A founders. They would not have gotten to where they are without a healthy dose of arrogance.

[ScottBurson]

> They would not have gotten to where they are without a healthy dose of arrogance.

I've seen this idea expressed on occasion. I don't think it's true. They need drive, they need confidence, they need decisiveness, they can certainly use a dash of charisma... but outright arrogance? No.

Arrogance is the refusal to consider even the possibility that one might be wrong. No dose of it is "healthy".