Jack Dorsey didn't go quietly when he announced his plans to step down as CEO.
He wrote that there is a lot of talk about the importance of being founder-led. I believe that is limiting and a single point of failure. I have worked hard to make sure this company can break away from its founding and founders.
It is critical that a company can stand on its own, free of its founder's influence or direction.
We found this to be a bit rich, since it was the first CEO of the company before he stepped down and returned to the role after five years. That is not a lack of founder control.
His comments are counternarrative.
In today's founder friendly environment, venture investors often bet on early teams based entirely on their to-date product progress, and founders are more likely to stay at the helm even after their companies have gone public.
We had a discussion about the value of founders who remain in leadership roles long after their companies have reached maturity.
A call to return to the old normal.
15 years ago, this take was completely uncontroversial. That is just a mark of how things have changed.
The business person was brought on by the investors to be the company's CEO. You have heard of him. It was commonplace in prior venture eras for founders to step aside from the top job once their company hit scale, as the thinking was that there were better suited for the role of scaling a tech company than founders.
What happened to the perspective? There are two things. First, returns from founder-led businesses. Under a single leader, Facebook has done well. You can also add in other names such asAirbnb and Coinbase.
Venture capitalists have lost a lot of their influence. The days of VCs sitting in their suburban office parks throne rooms and forcing founders to come to them are over. The core venture conceit has been rendered commodity due to the explosion in capital available to founders. Thanks to lower leverage, venture folks can't boss founders as much as they used to.
It is possible for founders to stay in charge of their companies for as long as they want, often ensconced in a warm blanket of super-voting shares. Not every VC likes this. Not every VC wants a CEO. You won't be able to get a single VC to push back on the idea of founder-friendliness, as they all want allocation in the next hot deal. It wouldn't make sense to tell founders that their walking, talking piggy banks might have an opinion, and that they should be replaced with someone with more operational experience.
There are times when founders are not the best to lead companies. This is true. There are great examples of capital creation thanks to long founder tenures, but there are even better examples of the opposite.
