

Startup founders likely to be replaced if company thrives - drm237
http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=2472
 Jeff Bezos, president and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, is an anomaly among modern-day entrepreneurs. He still has his job.<p>Unlike Bezos, many founders are replaced after launching a successful company, say Warren Boeker, a professor of management and organization at the University of Washington Business School, and graduate student Rushi Karichalil. Ironically, the founders who do remain in control usually launch only moderate performing ventures.
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cperciva
The article suggests that the correlation between corporate success and
founders being replaced is due to the influence of investors; I think there's
another far more innocent explanation: Many of the replaced founders WANTED to
be replaced.

I recently found a bug on the Yahoo website (a graph was being drawn
incorrectly) which could be fixed in a startup in about 15 minutes; but
because Yahoo is such a large company and has so many users, individual
developers can't go in and make even a trivial, obviously-correct fix to the
live website -- instead, it takes three weeks for the fix to go through QA
(along with all the other changes which have been prepared since the last QA
cycle).

A founder who has spent three years building a startup -- and being able to
fix bugs and see the results 30 seconds later -- isn't likely to be happy
working with a 3 week QA cycle. There's nothing wrong with either approach;
they're just suitable for different people.

Do what you're good at doing, and let someone else do what you're not good at
doing. If you're a startup hacker, then go do a startup; but once your company
is successful and not a startup any more, bow out and let someone else take
over. Staying around to do a job which you're neither interested in or good at
doesn't do any good for either you or your company.

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rwebb
i agree. this study is similar to Kaplan's horse/jockey analysis:

<http://www.vcconfidential.com/2006/04/horse_or_jockey.html>

but both studies ignore the fact that there are massive differences between a
good start up CEO and a good public company CEO...

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ph0rque
This article has a date of Aug. 28, 2002. I think the trend is away from
replacing company founders.

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pg
Also 35% does not equal "likely." In fact it would have been roughly twice as
accurate to have the opposite headline.

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jdavid
this was a big ear mark in the crossing the chasm book

