The Evolution of a Founder
If a Founder happens to be both lucky and good they get to watch something that started as a idea turn into a business and then that business grow from a startup to a growth company. The company evolves from trying to find product market fit to an organization seeking to operationalize continuous growth throughout the organization. As the business evolves a founder must make the conscious effort to evolve themselves as well.
Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Bill Gates, Tom Siebel, Hasso Plattner and Jack Ma are all part of a relatively small club of founders who ran their businesses from startup to beyond IPO. Given the different types of leadership needed at the different stages of growth it is rare for the same person to be able to adapt to the new roles & demands for successful leadership of the evolving business. In many venture backed high growth companies, investors tend to help the process of encouraging founders to “step aside” when they hit their ceiling and to bring in other management to take the business further on the journey. Some founders see it coming and engineer their evolution by bringing in strong complimentary management talent and learning from them. In some cases this involves using executive coaches like the legendary Bill Campbell. In other cases it involves bringing in talent like a COO or CTO (think Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook). At Google Larry and Sergei brought in Eric Schmidt in a collaborative arrangement that provided maximal leadership learning & exposure with the clear understanding that it was a temporary arrangement and that they would be taking back the reins when the time was right.
At my company 2020 has been the year of our evolution as a business and I am truly proud of how we have handled this change function. My co-founder and I have used this year to evolve our roles in the business and expand our leadership skills & perspectives. One of the biggest and best things we did was to improve and empower our management team. We hired a new Head of Growth and a CTO from our broad external network and we elevated our Director of Finance to CFO. We then further empowered the entire team through delegation of responsibilities that were in the past our own. Finally we stepped forward (not back) and focused our attentions on forward looking strategic product and business efforts. We are seeing the fruits of these labors ripen as we head into 2021.
We are entering 2021 with a strong pipeline of new business and products which should lead to a further acceleration of our business growth in a stable and profitable framework. I’m especially proud of the fact that through the actions of our broader leadership team, we have expanded the spectrum of diversity within the business significantly. At the start of 2019 our Female & BIPOC representation was roughly 15% of the team. We will start 2021 with it being over 35% of the team. This is amazing because it wasn’t a struggle or something that required special programs. It was done the same way any other recruiting was done but with an eye towards sourcing quality talent across a diversity of experiences.
So what should other founders take from this post? Change can be good especially when you make it a deliberate and conscious effort. Seek to be the founder that evolves with the business and not the founder who holds a business back based on your own personal limitations. Surround yourself with people who believe in your vision and mission; they can understand and respect the culture you’ve created; and they know how to take all that you have built and scale it at scale.
Okay to the photo at the top…Professor Xavier led the X-Men through a variety of challenges in the history of the MCU. The best thing he did was to empower his leadership team with the ability to lead the org so that they became more effective as a team regardless of what challenges they faced. The X-Men evolved and remained one of the strongest forces over their broad expanse of time. Makes me want to go back and look up the crossovers between the X-Men and the Avengers…Which team was better? Yes it is make believe but the salient points are real and the lessons are there for those to learn from :-)
