

Why founders fail: the product CEO paradox - kunle
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/10/why-founders-fail-the-product-ceo-paradox/

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hga
Joel Spolsky (remember him :-) gave us a great example of how Bill Gates did
product reviews in the early '90s:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html)
E.g.:

" _He didn 't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on
it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A
real, actual, programmer._"

And the article details how those two were intimately linked.

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null_ptr
A leader __has __to have technical competency, at least on a general level, on
the products their teams develop. How else could they make informed decisions?
Advisors can only help so much, the persons who ultimately make the big
decisions have to understand what 's going on. Sadly, these big companies are
less about technology and useful products and more about sales and marketing.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
A sad fact of life is that sales and marketing are what distinguish successful
products from flops. Regardless of the quality of your product, if users don't
know your product exists, understand how it can solve their problem and have a
efficient mechanism to adopt it, your product will die.

~~~
jiggy2011
True, although having an excellent product or at least a unique and
interesting product can multiply the effect of your marketing spend and
effort.

There are examples of products which have sold extremely well despite having
close to zero spent on marketing.

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OldSchool
Let me gently remind everyone that one success or failure is not completely
deterministic.

A single business failure or short-term success doesn't say much about someone
as a founder. That his/her interest and drive can be made to fit the current
market conditions plus still more relatively intangible luck in other areas
factor heavily in any end result.

Founders who have successfully built and sold, say at least three companies
for millions each over a period of years would tell me this person has a
genuine talent for entrepreneurship.

Best to go for it, and if it takes off get all you can while it's there to be
had, setting aside an untouchable personal nest egg as soon as you can. You
should have a feel for the business so if a good offer comes along when your
gut tell you that it has perhaps plateaued or peaked take that as an exit
sign. If it doesn't take off don't be discouraged, know when to make that exit
too.

~~~
rgbrenner
"Founders who have successfully built and sold, say at least three companies
for millions each over a period of years would tell me this person has a
genuine talent for entrepreneurship."

No.. it tells you this person is a lower risk than someone without a track
record or a worse track record.

History is filled with people and companies who had a string of successes
followed by failures. Those people weren't talented one day, and untalented
the next.

~~~
Dylan16807
Don't get so excited to point out bad statistics that you bias yourself in the
opposite direction.

You need the number of founders of this kind of company, and the overall
success ratio, before you can start judging skill vs. luck with any certainty.

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pcunite
As a founder, you are an idea, product, execution, sales, or customer service
guy. Rarely do you start out good at all of those. You may never have them
all. Get good help fast in the areas you fail at.

Founder's fail because they lose (or never really had) empathy for their
customers or staff in these areas. If you can't feel what your users/staff
feel, you can't properly navigate them out of their pain.

~~~
adrianbye
what about steve jobs?

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pedalpete
Unrelated, but I've noticed that often when Ben Horowitz discusses a
theoretical CEO, he will often refer to that CEO as a female. I'm sure it
isn't a mistake, but that he is consciously trying to promote female
leadership roles in the industry.

Does anybody else notice that?

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Dewie
We need a gender-neutral pronoun already. If you use "he" when it comes to a
hypothetical person, someone will say you're sexist, if you use "she" someone
will think you're overly PC, and writing "he/she" just doesn't roll of the
minds tongue.

EDIT: I've heard that "they" can be used.

~~~
nemetroid
The introduction of a genderless pronoun is a current topic in Sweden. Let me
assure you that the accusations about being overly PC are _far_ more prevalent
when using the new gender-neutral pronoun than when simply using the female
one.

~~~
Dewie
Indeed, that is the biggest problem with trying to use gender-neutral
pronouns. You'll probably be perceived as either someone who is overly
cautious about offending someone, or a gender studies academic or something
similar to that. Not that there's anything wrong with the latter, but you
can't have words being associated with certain "types" if you want to achieve
general colloquial adoption.

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danbmil99
Seems to me some founders are the right CEO for the first few years of a
company, and should be replaced at a certain point in scale. Typically they
transition to a CTO, board-level advisor, or chief visionary sort of position.
Often, after a few more years, the founder will leave, either because (s)he
hasn't been able to fully release the reins, or just because (s)he is bored
and wants to start a new venture. [edit: or because the CEO is a paranoid
psychopath and wants to scorch the earth, enforce fealty, and redact the
founder from the company history.]

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andrewflnr
Am I correct that part of the reason you don't "communicate direction" in
informal settings like ad hoc conversations is to make sure you've thought
everything through? I just imagine talking with someone and suddenly having a
cool idea that would necessitate a significant change in direction, and not
being able to talk about. So I've suddenly clammed up because I need to think
and can't do it out loud, and meanwhile my people might be working on the
wrong thing.

Would it be consistent with this article's philosophy to discuss it in that
context as "maybe it would be a good idea to..." rather than "this is what
we're doing"? I haven't actually run a company myself so there could be all
kinds of subtleties I'm clueless about... Actually, the question is not
whether there are any but which ones are relevant.

~~~
gregpilling
It kind of happens like that. You have to occasionally keep your mouth shut
because if you voice every product idea you have, then your staff may think
that is what you want them to do. It may just be some idle random concept that
comes to mind, but if you say it and find out later that your people have
worked on it, you may be sad.

So if you say, wouldn't it be cool if we made (product x) out loud, and it is
related to something your company might do, don't be too shocked if someone in
your company hears you and then does it. If you weren't serious, and that
person has spent 20 hours working hard on it, you will now come to two
conclusions. 1. You have wasted their time and your money 2. You now have to
disappoint a hard working, dedicated employee. You can't do that too often or
they get frustrated and leave.

So in my experience, when you have only ad hoc, verbal only meetings about
product, you will get bad results. I have made this error myself in the past.
If I want a good result from my staff, I have to give them clear, written
direction so that they can follow it and not need to continually check with
me.

You may once in a great while get a product you make a profit on, but it is
the exception and not the rule. It shouldn't take you so long to write out the
new idea that you should try to save time by blurting it out. Simply tell your
people what the idea is, and how it fits in with their previous priorities.
Toyota uses a sheet of A3 to propose ideas. The constraint helps produce
clearer direction.
[http://a3thinking.com/faq.html](http://a3thinking.com/faq.html)

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btilly
I believe that [http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/why-
foundi...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/why-founding-
ceos-fail-redux.html) has much more actionable advice for founders who do not
wish to be fired by their own boards.

~~~
Kliment
The number one point missing on there is "don't run a company you don't own".
If you don't control your board, you don't own the company.

~~~
btilly
That is true. However if you run a company you don't own and make those
mistakes, you'll wind up discovering your failure somewhat later after your
shortcoming have done much more damage.

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chromaform
Does anyone else find the author's stylistic choice of the generic 'her'
throughout this article a little weird? I'm all for using language to erode
stereotypes about the types of people involved in tech enterprise, so in
theory I should applaud TechCrunch here, but I feel like the use of the female
pronoun in an article describing a hypothetical CEO as a failed product is
perhaps a step in the wrong direction.

~~~
guylhem
In order to reach your goal of "using language to erode stereotypes about the
types of people involved in tech enterprise", would it be better to reserve
the use of "him" for failures and "her" for success?

I then suggest you are promoting a biased view. Some people alternate between
him and her, some just refer to the person in a way that does not indicate the
sex (this CEO, the founder...)

Somehow, I prefer the latter, because it's simply trying to present arguments
without reference to sex, instead of "using language to erode stereotypes
about the types of people involved in tech enterprise", which could also be
called "performing propaganda using newspeak" (and that is less politically
correct of course)

EDIT: as noted below, «If "she" is not allowed to fail, then "she" is not
accepted as an equal to the "he" is able to fail with spectacular results.» -
spot on

~~~
chromaform
I certainly would not advocate using 'him' for failure and 'her' for success.

I definitely would prefer to see neutral descriptors used in articles like
these (as I implied downthread); when I wrote "using language to erode
stereotypes" I intended it to be taken as an author alternating between
pronouns in a single work.

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sixQuarks
Sounds like he's talking about Groupon when he mentions the guy that took a
company to $1 billion in record time.

~~~
presty
[http://fyre.it/IJk0cj.4](http://fyre.it/IJk0cj.4)

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rdudekul
Product CEOs are intimately familiar with their products including design
decisions, code quality etc. This creates an attachment to get a little too
involved in implementation details even as the company is growing beyond say
100 people. One way to get a bit detached is to be deeply involved in hiring
people and coaching technical leadership. By thinking at a meta-level it is
not hard to arrive at some process that can be documented that teams can self-
manage well enough for product CEO to let go.

~~~
RyanZAG
I'd say this is exactly what the article is arguing against. A product CEO is
not necessarily going to be any good at hiring people or coaching leadership.
The product CEO letting go is often the very worst thing that can happen,
since the product CEO is the one who provided the framework that all of the
products are succeeding on.

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rwallace
Lots of good advice, but I'll disagree with the bit about insisting on formal
documents instead of e-mail - might work for some people but if you're not one
of those people, you might end up getting paralyzed by the task of writing
formal documents for everything. If e-mail is what works for you, use it. Bill
Gates used to give a lot of guidance by e-mail and Linus Torvalds still does.

~~~
jfarmer
I believe the reason he is advocating for formal documents is that it's a more
effective way to disseminate and reinforce culture, standards, and vision once
a company gets larger than a certain size.

There are a few nice features of writing vs. talking in person. First, it
makes it less likely two people will take what you said differently. Second,
it immediately creates a shared vocabulary. Third, it creates an artifact that
can both be revisited and shared with new folks entering the company. Fourth,
everyone knows everyone else knows. Even if what you're saying is totally
innocuous, if you tell Person A but Person B finds out you told Person A
before you can tell Person B yourself (maybe they were out sick that day,
whatever), you run the risk of people seeing an "inner circle" and an "outer
circle." "Knowing first" can become a kind of very counterproductive gold
star.

I think those are more like the reasons he was advocating for writing rather
than some obsession about process _per se_.

~~~
rwallace
I agree, these are good reasons to prefer writing over verbal communication.
But you can obtain them by dashing off an e-mail to a mailing list, you don't
have to spend hours sweating over how to phrase a formal document.

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sytelus
Are there any examples of a "professional CEO" who replaced the "product CEO"
brought the company around or took it to the next level? It would be an
interesting research if someone collected these data and calculated this
probability.

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davidwhodge
Google, sort of.

~~~
seunosewa
No. Larry & Sergey were not 'replaced'.

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yuhong
From the comments: "i wounder how successful is the obvious approach- grow or
bring in a strong and trusted VP Product?"

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auggierose
Loved the post. I'll keep that advice in mind.

