The skills needed to run an organisation at 5 employees is quite different than at 100, or 2k, to 10k. With 50 employees, you might succeed just by having a ph

The skills needed to run an organisation at 5 employees is quite different than at 100, or 2k, to 10k. With 50 employees, you might succeed just by having a phenomenal head for details, and managing to know everything the organisation is doing, and remembering everyones names. When small, that skill is useless (anyone can remember the names of every employee when you only have a dozen); when larger that skill can't be applied (you can't know everything happening in a company with offices on multiple continents). Occasionally you find someone who, by sheer chance, is good at every stage of growth, but they're very rare. Hence why growing organisations almost invariably change CEOs to match their changing management styles as they grow. At 12k employees, Uber is starting to get to the stage where they need someone in charge that's really good at managing the people who are in charge of managing to teams of people who manage the people who actually do stuff; if they're going to keep growing they certainly need that. > Plenty of startups have been lead to success by founders with zero business accumen. Very few of them have been led by the same founder with clear success for their entire growth path from 1 to hundreds of thousands of employees. It's not about business accumen; it's about scale. If it helps, consider a software project: A very small project could be done by one person over a few days; a very large project might have many teams of programmers over a few years. Think about how different they are--they'll need need totally different approaches, technologies, etc., and many skilled programmers who might excel at one might struggle or be unhappy in the other.