The Challenges faced by the CEO of a Startup in Growth-Mode (and how to Overcome them?)
As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours, and cried.
Ben’s quote isn’t only applicable to startup CEOs but the ones managing high growth companies.
While growth is extremely gratifying, it brings along something pernicious — the dramatic change in its CEO’s style. Because, let’s face it, the kind of style that worked in a close-knit twenty-people startup wouldn’t necessarily work when the company scales to hundreds of team members.
The leader of a band-of-twenty-odd-friends who chugged beers every Friday evening — a concoction divined to elevate any engineer’s motivation to pay off the entire technical debt in an evening, listened to Time while doing pair programming because like Roger Waters they didn’t want to fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way, cracked some wickedly terrible nerdy jokes, must now reinvent to be a business savvy CEO — A leader who can effortlessly manage a mid-size enterprise, without breaking a sweat, making everyone feel like that s/he was born to do this.
All the books and guidance out there in the leader-verse talk about evolving and managing aspects of the…
