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Leader and founder is not the same thing. I think the key difference is that a founder has a much better understanding of the company as a complex system. This
by sarbak 2y ago
Leader and founder is not the same thing.
I think the key difference is that a founder has a much better understanding of the company as a complex system. This understanding includes not just how people think it works at a certain point. It includes all the previous attempts, reasoning behind those attemps, the context of past failures and successes, the personal dynamics behind those choices.
Complex systems are notoriously hard to understand. Seeing the system develop from zero to complexity is an experience and perspective that is impossible to replace. Even most early employees don't have a comparable understanding.
Of course not all founders know everything about all the key components of their businesses, but the founding team does have a much much better understanding than other person. I think that's why founders get frustrated with ineffective things. While most others have to account for unknown unknowns and give others benefit of doubt, the founders have a much better and robust understanding of why things happen the way they happen.
The difference between management and leadership may be more about where you focus and how you engage others. Being a founder and being a leader is different in how well you understand the system.
- neom 2y agoI think there is an interesting question in: should more founders be public market CEOs leading their vision? That is a super interesting question imo. We had a lot of discussion about this at DigitalOcean pre ipo, it's the main reason I left, and after I left the CEO was still my best friend and after a lot of conversation, he didn't feel like public market exec sounded that interesting either, the whole founding leadership team switched over. I'm not sure about the other guys, but a couple of us basically said "we're founders not public market execs" and bowed out. I say kudos to Brian, Jeff Lawson, Matthew Prince etc for doing both, because I've heard that the job in the public markets can get brutal. https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stock-screener/founder-led-companies https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stock-screener/founder-led-com...
- whymauri 2y agoAnyone can be a founder. Not everyone can be a leader.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoNot everyone can be a founder. But in my experience a good founder doesn’t necessarily make a good leader. Not a CEO anyway, but it depends on the role of the CEO. If the the CEO is “chief strategy and opportunity officer” then some founders are often quite well suited to it. But we should bear in mind that all founders do not have the same skill set. Woz was also a founder of Apple and a great engineer but not a CEO.
- zachthewf 2y agoPedantically, literally everyone can be a founder. At this moment, you can decide that you are starting a company. You are now a founder. (This is why Founder is historically an unprestigious job that smells a lot like Unemployed, though the startup hype cycle of the last 15 years changed that.)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]