Twitter’s Business School for CEO

As one prepares to start as CEO in a new startup, I was looking at everything that you could learn about being a CEO from great entrepreneurs on twitter. The most concise one is this from Ryan Denehy. His interview with Anthony Pompliano is great.

At some point I think the only three things a startup CEO needs to be excellent at are:

👩‍🏫 Recruiting – hiring / retaining / motivating the best people

📖 Storytelling – articulating the vision and plan internally / externally

👀 Awareness – how are things *actually* going?

— Ryan Denehy (@DenehyXXL) February 26, 2020

Sahil Lavingia, author of ‘the minimalist entrepreneur’, one of the books I like the most on entrepreneurship, shares the same opinion:

A CEO’s first job is to get the company capitalized.

A CEO’s second job is to recruit a team.

A CEO’s third job is to provide them with clarity so they can solve their customers' problems.

A CEO’s fourth job is to get out of the way until one of the above is no longer true.

— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) July 16, 2020

I think that to get the company capitalized is the same think that Ryan means with ‘awareness’. So I actually understand that both have the same opinion, just with different words. Not surprisingly, then, Ryan used (almost) the same words:

The first job of every CEO was, is, and will always be: don't run out of money.

— Ryan Denehy (@DenehyXXL) May 18, 2022

An important part of that is to protect the captable. At whatever cost!

And maybe, because of that, Sahil concludes 😂:

CEO is a bullshit job.

— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) February 3, 2023

It may be for a while. For Ryan, CEO is a very dynamic job and changes a lot with the stage of the company. In these 2 tweets he gives examples of this evolution according to number of employees and funding round (which correlates):

Been doing this ~15 years and still shocked how different the job of founder/CEO is at each stage
– Seed: artist/storyteller
– Series A: player coach
– Series B: operations and strategy
– Series C+: professional CEO
Can't think of any other job that changes so much every year.

— Ryan Denehy (@DenehyXXL) November 11, 2020

Phases of the founder/CEO lifecycle by employee count:
– Army of one (1)
– Player coach (2-30)
– Part-time mgr, part-time CEO (30-100)
– Exec leader (100+)
Easy to get stuck in one phase when the biz needs you in the next. In every case you can hire your way out of the problem!

— Ryan Denehy (@DenehyXXL) September 7, 2021

On the hiring part, there is excellent advice (though not easy to act upon) from Pomp:

Building a successful company boils down to your ability to hire the best people and put the right incentives in place.

— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) January 5, 2022

A great selection process without the right incentives, is not going to take you too far.

The next one is very aligned with my experience leading research groups:

Hire givers, not takers.

— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) September 4, 2022

Every e-mail that I receive asking for a position comes with (a variation of) the sentence

“I believe this experience would contribute to my career”

But what I’m interested (tip for anyone wanting to apply) is in what YOUR experience can contribute to our group!

Last but not least, this tweet from Jason Lemkin: when creation and sales, business and technical, heart and mind are aligned… that is when magic happens.

When your CTO wants it as badly as you do

That's when true magic happens

— Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  (@jasonlk) April 11, 2023

This could be the other way around of course: when a CTO is looking for a CEO to co-found and he founds one that wants it as much as he does… that is when magic happens.