"Fast growth is exhilarating. It is also unforgiving. Especially in AI, many companies are seeing hyper-growth, changing the leadership job faster than many founder-CEOs expected. What once required deep personal involvement suddenly demands scale and breadth. The question for leadership is how to adapt without losing the mission, or the magic, that made the company take off in the first place."
"In mature companies, CEOs manage the full remit by spreading their time to juggle it all. However, founder-CEOs are often different. They tend to be spiky in their strengths: exceptional product intuition, deep engineering judgment, or a visceral connection to the mission. Those strengths are not incidental. They are why the company exists. The best founder-CEOs do not abandon or dull their strengths and quirks."
Hyper-growth in AI forces leadership roles to evolve as companies scale. Founder strengths that drive early success can become constraints when leaders stay too close to execution. Founder-CEOs must concentrate on activities only they can perform: setting direction, placing big strategic bets, and building senior leadership. Distinctive product intuition, engineering judgment, and mission connection remain critical but must be applied at a higher altitude. Delegation of detailed design, technical debates, and operational tasks prevents the CEO from being crowded out of strategic priorities. Deliberate redefinition of founder responsibilities enables scaling while preserving mission, culture, and innovative edge.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]