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Individual contributor here. How “good” a founder is doesn’t fix relationships across the organization. Communication and people management are very hard to get

• bitL 7y ago
  There are techniques taught at top business schools that deal with these issues and how to design an organization that actively encourages or suppresses certain traits; look up principal-agent problem, rotating leadership, voting out team leads teams don't like (Apple) etc. The problem is that at startups there aren't such managers, tech in general gets some of the worst managers out there and founders typically "know better" to learn from somebody else.
• yowlingcat 7y ago
  You're misquoting what I said -- I was talking about how good of a job the founder did, not some vague quality of the founder in and of themselves. Communication and people management are hard to get right in part because of strong, delayed second order effects. A founder is setting the tone and setting up culture at every step in their company, so they are actually accountable for every issue in the trenches, in so far as they are the last line of defense against a systemic problem. While you can do what is in your power, you are different from them in that the buck does not stop with you, it stops with them. You do not have founder level influence, control and responsibility for the company, but they do. If you don't hold a founder accountable for systemic problems in their company, they have no other way to truly bear a proportional level of accountability (relative to ownership) to your own.