CEOs and startups

Yesterday we wrote that leadership in many ways is situational -- the time, place and environment dictate who gets to lead.  In that piece we were talking about Winston Churchill's becoming prime minister and head of the war effort in 1940.

Becoming CEO of a startup company is another good illustration.  As many have learned, the growth and development of a company from concept to full-scale operation is not a continuum, but a series of milestones. A common mistake for chief executives is to look too far beyond the next milestone, thinking, for example, about issues related to scale-up when they are still proving their concept.

The greatest challenge of all, of course, is when the situation changes, or advances, to the next stage and investors push for new leadership, experienced running a larger organization,  to take the company forward. A complicating factor is the CEOs ownership position and what to do about it. This post by Steve Blank in his informative blog on life in early stage companies provides some good insights for CEOs.

His take: the job of a founding CEO is "to find a repeatable and scalable business model. The goal of your business model can be revenues, or profits, or users, or click-throughs ( or even just to get the technology into production) whatever the founders and their investors have agreed upon." Steve had defined this in more detail in an earlier posting.