Not every startup founder is best at the CEO role – some choose to remain focused on technical details, others take a more strategic role, and some simply hand over operations to a trusted team and go on to their next venture. If you are a smart entrepreneur, you need to know your skills and see if it’s in the best interests of your company for you to serve as CEO. After all, it is a lot of hard work!
Below is yet another post from serial entrepreneur Dharmesh Shah:
Everyone thinks that being a startup CEO is a glamorous job or one that has to be a ton of fun. That’s what I now refer to as the “glamour brain” speaking aka the startup life you hear about from the press. You know the press articles I’m talking about… the ones that talk about how easy it is to raise money, how many users the company is getting, and how great it is to be CEO. Very rarely do you hear about what a bitch it is to be CEO and how it’s not for every founder that wants to be an entrepreneur. I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about what it takes to be a great Startup CEO that is also a founder. Here are some of the traits I’ve found.
- Be a keeper of the company vision
- Absorb pain for the team
- Find the smartest people and defer on domain expertise
- Be a good link between company & investors
- Be a good link between the company & product
- Be able to learn on the job
- No experience almost preferred
… Read more requirements, and descriptions and examples of each, on Dharmesh’s blog onStartups
