A founder is inherently more motivated than any manager or employee. Thus, the more hands-on the founder can be with as many employees as possible, the more tha

A founder is inherently more motivated than any manager or employee. Thus, the more hands-on the founder can be with as many employees as possible, the more that motivation will propagate throughout the company. The managerial perspective is "just pay people more to motivate them" or otherwise "strong vision will motivate". But paying someone more (at least beyond a class threshold) is only likely to motivate them in the short term. After a few months, they go back to hedonistic baseline. "Strong vision" is just corpo-speak for corpo-speak. Real vision comes from a founder pushing as many sides of the company as possible, often by example rather than meetings. Interestingly, our United States seems to have this problem. Genius and scrappy founders establish a government now overtaken by incompetent suits. It may be the natural way of things. Success leads to complacency leads to incompetence. Eventually new players take over and the cycle repeats. Creative destruction and all that.