Image credit: Automobile
The following is an edited excerpt from Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook by Dan Shapiro. The excerpt was provided by O’Reilly Media. You can buy a copy here.
(A version of this was delivered as a talk at the Dent 2014 conference – complete with a personal record of 82 slides in 24 minutes.)
The CEO builds the team
It’s unfortunate, but one of the more common problems that I hear from aspiring startup CEOs is that they have a great idea for a business, but they need just a wee bit of help finding a co-founder to build it.
This is like saying you’re going to be a famous rock star just as soon as you learn to play an instrument.
The CEO’s greatest influence on the company isn’t her contributions to the product, the strategy, or even getting the company funded. The CEO’s greatest contribution to the company is the wizardry required to hire a team that is going to be amazingly effective at executing the company’s strategy. Great CEOs hire teams that are far better than they have any right to expect. Put succinctly, a core competency for a CEO is to “date up.”
The CEO’s most important responsibility is building the team, and the most important part of the team is the founders. If the CEO can’t find a co-founder who believes in her and her vision strongly enough to take the jump, it’s vanishingly unlikely she’ll be able to fill out the rest of the executive team, let alone convince an investor to part with her dollars.
As the team starts to grow, the CEO is still the core of the company’s team building.
The CEO is the keeper of the vision
It turns out that not every CEO is a visionary. In fact, a company’s vision can come from multiple sources. Sometimes it’s thoughtfully developed by a founder, after spending years toiling away in the murky depths of an industry. Sometimes it comes from many weeks or months of consideration, observation, and inspiration by the founding team working together. Sometimes the boss steals it from an underpaid analyst.
The CEO does not need to be the visionary. But the CEO does need to champion the vision, evangelize it, and keep it alive through the darkest days of the company.
The CEO is strategist-in-chief
A vision is useless if it is lost in the minutiae of day-to-day life. The role of the CEO is a continual balancing act: on the one hand, keeping the company alive and out of danger; on the other, moving the business inexorably toward something bigger. Those two roles are often at odds, and in most cases, the pivot point of the seesaw is the CEO.
That kind of strategic decision making must come from the CEO. It simply cannot be delegated.
Being the CEO means making good decisions fast. The CEO who agonizes for months over a response to a competitor, who changes the product strategy every time she talks to a customer, who pivots three times in four quarters – this is not an executive who will lead her company to success.
The CEO manages the investors
Fundraising is a painful necessity for many young companies. It demands knowledge of esoteric laws and nance instruments used nowhere else in the world. It requires access to a network of relationships that many founders don’t already have. And like any sales process, it’s grueling, disheartening, and ego bruising. Worst of all, most companies fail at it.
The CEO owns critical relationships
The CEO sets the company culture
Delegation: The common thread
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