Agreed. And leading and inspiring a team is done by having a burning vision, communicating it to the team, getting them excited and making it their vision too a

Agreed. And leading and inspiring a team is done by having a burning vision, communicating it to the team, getting them excited and making it their vision too and doing that on a daily basis. Day to day operations can be handled by COO, CFO, CMO, VP and other lieutenant roles. Why not hire Steve Singh as chief operating officer? Why not even lower down the totem pole? Is it because there's a fear that 'talent' of that quality may not take the job without a CEO title? Money can solve that. If there's an ego in the way, perhaps that's a problem. I've scaled our business from 2 people to 10 to 20 and now to 30 with high 8 figures in revenue. I'm quite comfortable that I can scale it to any number. The reason is that I am very comfortable hiring people that are smarter than me and putting them in leadership roles in the organization, stepping back and trusting them and heavily relying on them to do an excellent job. Stepping back and trusting takes an incredible leap of faith as a founder. You also need to be comfortable asking Fortune 5000 execs to work for you in a VP or C suite role. You also need to be able to pay them. If you can do those three things, you can assemble a team of lieutenants that will run their business divisions, provide you excellent visibility in all areas without over communicating and you will be able to scale into infinity as they replicate your strategy for scaling by hiring trusted lieutenants. It also helps if you know how little you actually know, can be completely honest about that with your exec team and ask them for help and input and trust them to give you what you need. I haven't experienced this, but it seems to me that firing founder CEOs and 'hiring a mature CEO' is conventional VC wisdom and it's based on a pattern they've seen work. e.g. Cisco. Once you raise big VC, I'm not sure that as a young founder you actually have a say unless you specifically build controls into your funding agreements. In FB, Zuck controls about 60% of the voting rights. He's 33. You have to ask yourself if he'd be CEO if the voting structure was different.