How to Completely Rethink and Redesign Your Role as a Founding CEO

Founders spend hours designing their organization; determining which functions should be combined or disaggregated; scoping needed roles; determining the level and compensation for those roles; and recruiting new executives. And yet, founders rarely take stock in their own role, which is among the highest leverage in the entire organization. And just as a company’s strategy must continually evolve, a startup founder must frequently take stock in the work they are uniquely excellent at and craft the right role for themselves.?

Founders stay in role for longer

A decade ago, Harvard Business Review found that after 3 years, 50% of founders were no longer in control of their companies; and upon IPO, less than 25% of founders remained as CEO. However, in 2021, a CEO ouster in the pre-IPO stages of a company’s journey is far less common and many founders remain in the CEO seat for far longer than used to be the case; founder-led IPOs from just the last few years include: Zoom, DoorDash, Airbnb, Stitch Fix and Snowflake. This is one side effect of the marked increase in competitiveness in venture capital for deal access, which has resulted in a higher level of founder friendliness, or investor willingness to cede control of a company to the original founder for longer.?

What that means for the founder is that they are in the leadership seat for longer, and what they may not know is what they should be doing in that role as their company, their team, and they themselves evolve.?

A seed-stage founding CEO likely has to divide their time across fundraising, early customers, hiring, product and just getting the company off the ground. Whereas, once a company reaches the Supercritical stage, they likely have enough financial resources to begin to build a team of experienced leaders around them. As they hire a Head of Sales, a Head of Engineering, a Head of Operations, and so forth, very rarely do they pause deliberately and consider how their role should evolve now that they have shaved off work that they used to do themselves. That should change.

The case for deliberately designing the founder role around flow

Not pausing and taking stock of their unique skills overlayed with the needs of the company is a missed opportunity for founders. McKinsey and others who conduct research in this field have found that CEOs are up to five times more productive when working in their personal flow state. What if a founder could increase the amount of time they are in flow state by 2x, 3x, 10x??

Founders have the ultimate privilege and responsibility to design their role to maximize their impact for the benefit of their organization. They also have a greater ability to add resources around their weaknesses or functions they don’t like doing, than do other employees.?

One founder I worked with experimented with removing all management layers from his company. I asked him how he liked spending all his time in 1:1s with several dozen direct reports. He told me that he hated it. When I asked him why he designed an organization that gave him a role he hated, he realized that he was in a unique position to change it and rethink his role as founder and CEO.?

Another founder recently told me that one of the biggest mistakes she made was leading the finance function for too long during her A and B round phases of growth. Her investors and other founders gave her “rules of thumb” not to hire a Head of Finance until she hit certain revenue targets and so even though she had the cash and equity to hire a great finance leader, she kept the function under her until her C round. She reflected that this depleted her energy and prevented her from spending as much time as she could in her flow state, which was primarily around brand and customer experience.?

So if you’re considering how to rethink your role as CEO, here is my three step approach for how to do it:?

1. Elevate: Identify your unique sources of professional flow or play: Ask yourself what you are uniquely excellent at and love doing? When do you get lost in your work? On the flipside, what do you procrastinate or dread doing? If you imagine your dream job, what are you doing? ?
2. Ground: Identify that, which needs to be done today and which only you can do: What will break if you don’t do it? What opportunities will be missed without you right now???
3. Plan: Lastly, develop a multi-quarter or multi-year plan to move as much of your role towards your flow state as possible. To do this, you will need to either redesign or offload to others as much of your non-flow activities as possible. From bucket two, identify any non-flow activities that can be offloaded with the right resources or planning, and consider what you would need to do so and when that might be feasible even if the timeline is longer-term. What flow state activities will you substitute in??

See full founder role design template here.?

A more inclusive approach to being a founding CEO?

Lastly, doing this work makes the founder role more inclusive for those who may not see themselves reflected in traditional founder archetypes. Many incredible female or BIPOC executives have expressed that they don’t think they’re [salesy, visionary, technical, fill-in-the-blank] enough. And while the founder journey is not for everyone, it’s time to let go of stereotypical CEO personas, and embrace a more inclusive and flexible founder role that maximizes flow, and ultimately business success.?

The next generation of founders will not only not look like the previous generation, but they may have markedly different leadership roles to the benefit of their companies.?

Susan Alban is operating partner and chief people officer of Renegade Partners, an early-stage venture capital fund, where she advises founders on all elements of company growth and people strategy. Previously, Susan was a consultant at McKinsey & Company and the first general manager of Uber EATS in the Bay Area. Before joining Renegade, she was VP Ops and VP People at Zume, Inc. during its period of hyper-growth. She found her professional home as an HR-focused VC through this exercise!