There might be fundamental incompatibilities here because of orthogonal goals - if you're an ambitious person in a corporate hierarchy won't one (or maybe even

There might be fundamental incompatibilities here because of orthogonal goals - if you're an ambitious person in a corporate hierarchy won't one (or maybe even primary) goal be to climb the ladder? And if you're a founder won't your goal be to 'grow the product or service'? Now one way to climb the ladder may be to grow the product or service, but in a larger org the ability to influence a product or service in a major way might be a bit limited, with decision-making at the business level being controlled by upper echelons. So the ladder-climbing process would select for different skills and temperament than founding/running a company. Essentially, in a corporate hierarchy, we're asking people with ladder-climbing skills to become business people as they reach the top, and not everyone can make that transition successfully. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that very few can actually make that transition successfully. Human brains learn through feedback [1]. To become a good business person, you need to run a business and get feedback just like a real founder/CEO, including business failures. Your question essentially becomes - how can a CEO structure incentives so that managers at all levels become good business people? It's a great question, to which there is no simple answer that I know of. Would appreciate any pointers to potential solutions. One way could be to treat each team at a certain level (say no more than 50 people) as a business of its own. It might not be the most efficient way for the corporation to deliver on its objectives, but it would likely create a lot of business-savvy managers. But now you have a pool of business-savvy folks that want to get paid like founders, and that might not be possible in a corporation. In terms of (in)efficiency, you could have duplicate teams that provide similar services, wasting resources, and adding costs to spin up new teams as existing ones fail or move on. Something like this might be more feasible at a societal level - a capitalistic structure that encourages the growth of smaller size businesses while inhibiting the growth of mid- to large corporates. Open source organizations actually seem to be the closest that I've seen that seem to operate this way. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA