[freejack]

Whether or not it's a waste of time depends on the commitment you've made to your customers. Jobs obsessed over design for a reason. Our promise is to provide exceptional customer service, so that's how we prioritize our time.

[weaponofchoice]

Well said.

Though, habits like these (suggested by the article) early-on could shape the startup's perception of their commitment to their customers. It could end up being a costly 'culture' thing.

It's still debatable whether dealing with customers daily, makes for productive use of an executive's precious time, even if the startup's value proposition revolves around exceptional customer service.

I've witnessed a few small companies getting infinitely better, once they started hiring the right people to fill sales and customer relations positions, that were usually handled by the founders themselves.

[freejack]

Well, I can say that it has been a great use of my time :-) The increased focus has demonstrably paid off in terms of real revenue and customer activity that I don't think we could have tapped into with a lesser focus. Everyday I'm seeing new things that help us improve, that help me set a strategic direction that would be muted if the feedback were filtered through intermediaries.

There are other ways of organizing of course. Someone once told me that its way better to organize around the strengths and weaknesses of the people that you have and the people that become available than it is to organize within the constraints of an org. chart "because that's the way its done". I'm sure that if we had a different mix of skills, we might choose to delegate differently, but this is what works for us. For example, I spend very little time worrying about engineering matters compared to the amount of time I spend managing customer service workflows. What matters is whether we're putting points on the board, not so much which plays we're running.