Chapter 16Founder versus CEO
Being a founder is no guarantee of being a CEO for life – or at least the life of your company. During the past decade, there have been some prominent examples of founders/CEOs with an enormous amount of power thanks to highly favorable stock-ownership arrangements. Probably the most well-known is Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.
It takes two different skillsets to start a company and to run one, and not every founder has it in them to be a CEO, or vice versa. More often than not, it will be your investors who make the determination whether a founder can go the distance, and you're potentially vulnerable at any stage.
“I'm entrepreneurial, but I'm not an entrepreneur,” says Paul Schaut, an eight-time CEO who several times has been put in the role by boards. “If you create an idea, and you go start a company, and put your name on it – that takes a lot of guts. I have more confidence in recognizing other people's ideas and the potential in those ideas and putting my name behind it rather than on it.”
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