How a great founder becomes a great CEO

You're never for sale. In fact, you have seduced a buyer. They see the fantasy, they fall in love.

To be a founder is a state of being, it's an attitude. To be a CEO is a craft. The more founders who can accept that those are two separate things and they're both equally important to build an ascendant startup, the better all of us will be.

"Founder mode" refers to a popular management concept suggesting founders should stay hands-on rather than delegating like traditional managers.

Founder mode gets me angry. It really felt like an excuse. We were giving founders a permission to not learn the job.

You should hire people who have already done the thing you need to have done next. Start with, it's 12 months later, you hired the person, they started today, 12 months have gone by, you're clinking champagne because of how great it's been. What's changed about the business?

The lazy ones think it's just gambling like, oh cool, they worked at Meta and Salesforce already, so hire them, just gambling.

If you were an outstanding performer in Job A, it is a high likelihood that in job B, someone associated with you in job A is going to pull you into the next thing.

Phase one is build something people want to buy. Phase two, the one we don't talk about is now you have to build a company around that thing people want to buy. Building a company is always the same.

If you keep doing what you're doing, you keep getting what you're getting.

All we're looking for in the beginning is a white-hot center of opportunity, a small population that is an enormous fan that's getting enormous impact.

Your voice has a megaphone attached to it even if you can't hear it. So you have to turn down the megaphone if you actually want to learn what your people have to say.

More companies die from suicide than homicide, and it's grim, but also if the two or three people in charge of the business can't get along, nothing else matters.