Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox

If I knew what I knew in the past

I would have been blacked out on your a**

—Kanye West,Black Skinhead

Because I am a prominent advocate for founders running their own companies, whenever a founder fails to scale or gets replaced by a professional CEO, people send me lots of emails. What happened, Ben? I thought founders were supposed to better? Are you going to update your “Why We Prefer Founding CEOs” post?

In response to all of these emails: No, I am not going to rewrite that post, but I will...