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No way is it a lie. The kind of people who enjoy running a company with a ragtag group of 10 employees in the early days are rarely the kind of people who will
by matte_black 9y ago
No way is it a lie.
The kind of people who enjoy running a company with a ragtag group of 10 employees in the early days are rarely the kind of people who will be able to effectively run a 10000 employee operation.
If you’re growing fast there is no time for on-the-job training as CEO. You need to be effective immediately or else you are only hurting your company’s growth.
- mariushop 9y agoOh my God, the company's growth? Then we MUST axe the CEO. He's just a human, after all. Don't want humans to hurt company's growth. Company's growth. Growth.
- goatherders 9y agoWhen you take outside money then growth or profit become the only metrics that matter. That's how capitalism works.
- ABeeSea 9y agoExactly, it’s better to let an inexperienced CEO let the company burn through funds and shut down than to bring in someone experienced with managing large teams and implementing a strategy towards a vision. It’s a learning experiment.
- meddlepal 9y agoIf you're not growing you're dying.
- parrellel 9y ago...but, if you're growing too much, you might be cancer.
- Domenic_S 9y agoYeah, the problem is those humans have nowhere to grow. Would you be happy with the same salary, job title, etc for a decade?
- apotheothesomai 9y agoWhen that human and their company has taken tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of investors' money, yes, growth is everything. Investments need to be paid back with interest. Without a lot of growth, investors are just giving away money. What do you think an investment is? How do you think business works? The guy didn't get pushed out in any event.
- mistersquid 9y agoIt's funny, because I absolutely agree with your assessment. But then I started a couple of thought experiments. How about the reverse case? Would, say, Meg Whitman or Satya Nadella, for example, be able to act as a CEO or co-founder of a small company, say < 10 employees? But then I thought about Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and, well, you hopefully get my point. Which is, even though I agree that most startup founders probably would not be able to head the same company as it grew by multiple orders of magnitude, there are enough famous outliers that we know it can be done and can be done spectacularly well. There must be a statistical name for this apparent paradox. (Or am I just experiencing confirmation bias?) EDIT: grammar nits
- dkural 9y agoMeg Whitman ran eBay when it was 30 people.
- skylark 9y agoYou're thinking of survivorship bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- matte_black 9y agoIt's entirely possible that some big CEOs can't do well with a small company of 10 employees or so. A lot of the skills they have are mostly focused on managing larger organized teams, which is not the same skillset for small teams. It's strategy vs tactics. Maybe at one point they could, early in their career, but by now those skills may have atrophied.
- freehunter 9y agoI think the phrase you're looking for is "exceptions that prove the rule". For every CEO that took a company from nothing to 10k employees, there are so many more examples of the opposite that you can't even begin to name them. You're able to name the exceptions because there are so few exceptions.
- 9y ago