Founder & CEO is kinda a BS title

I’ve come to believe it’s an impossible title. You’re either CEO, or you’re Founder. You can’t hold both full-time jobs.

Because a Founder’s job is injecting risk into the business. It’s flooding it with new ideas, stuff that seems hard to do, ideas that no one else would dare try, placing the kinds of bets that only someone who started the damn thing would be willing to wager. A Founders’ job is basically to stay in business by almost always putting it out of business.

A CEO’s job? Just about the opposite. It’s reducing risk, executing diligently to achieve obvious goals, staying in business at all costs. It’s primarily about about being conservative, keeping the company’s collective cool, and not letting things get out of hand.