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by awakeasleep
3145 days ago
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How many founders start their company as a way to enrich capital holders or investors? That’s the job of a CEO. A founder is supposed to think about stuff that often competes with that, like making employees feel motivated or delivering value to customers. Hell, even building a healthy company is often at odds with capital return. We see daily examples where the ‘right’ thing to do (from capitals perspective) is to sell off all assets, submerge the company in debt, and abandon ship. |
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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.