You’re likely a lousy startup CEO

Dear Readers,

If you’re the CEO of a startup, chances are, you’re doing a lousy job. How can anyone do a good job when the role isn’t well-defined and is constantly changing?

A startup CEO’s job scope varies, depending on what the company needs. At a small scrappy business, a CEO wears multiple hats, doing everything from fundraising, accounting, and recruitment to finding product-market fit and fixing the toilet bowls in the office restroom.

When the company hits the product-market fit, the CEO should stay focused on just a few core duties, such as fundraising, management, and hiring. As the startup scales, pick the areas you do well and delegate everything else. In the process, you’ll have to learn to let go and trust that the key people you chose will do the job well. If they don’t, you’re screwed. You’ll be back to square one, so be ready to rehire, re-onboard, and retrain.

As your job continues to evolve, you need to keep pace, and no one else can tell you when to do what. Apart from deciding on the company’s direction, you also have to consistently optimize your role as CEO because you want to be a useful and effective leader.

And because change is frequent, you’re more or less in a new role every six months. So chances are high that you will fuck things up. And when that happens, your board, team members – and sometimes even yourself – will make you feel like you’re the lousiest CEO ever.

Quitting is often the first solution that first comes to mind when the going gets tough. But quitting in times of trouble will just confirm – once again – that you’re a lousy CEO. So don’t up and leave until you’ve absolutely exhausted all other options. Show more grit and be responsible: own the problem and give it a chance to help you grow and get to the next level.

And in line with the idea of turning things around, here are some startup stories that you might like:

• The profitable fintech startup that took off after pitching to Jack Ma on a cruise ship
• M17’s ill-fated IPO: CEO reveals all
• Inside aCommerce’s plan to become profitable by 2020
• Why Jack Ma thought about quitting Alibaba in 2001
• GoGoVan’s CEO on $1b merger
• How a blog for Indonesian millennials became a media company with 50 million readers
• How this travel-booking platform survived for 14 years and outlasted its competitors

But if you’ve thought things through and realized you do want to step down, then that’s fine too. It’s understandable, because taking a startup from zero to one is fundamentally different from taking it from one to two. So be honest about your decision, communicate it early, and build up a succession plan.

In short, the startup CEO role is effing hard. So it’s definitely true that founders (or anyone, really) often don’t make great CEOs.

Yes, we try as hard as we can. But you and I have to accept that we’re most likely terrible at our jobs.

Sincerely,
Willis
CEO at Tech in Asia

P.S. It’s not surprising, though, that some of us stayed on because there’s probably no other job that could possibly give us this mountain to climb. Scaling such heights helps us grow professionally and also as a person. And if you’re a startup CEO who’s marching on, congratulations! Please reply to this note. I’d love to hear your stories and thoughts.