Startups are made of people!
August 19, 2008
Fred Wilson has an interesting post titled, “The Human Piece of the Venture Equation” where he wonders aloud how he is going to deal with the fact that so many of his CEOs are so young (Tumblr CEO is 21, Disqus CEO is 22, Etsy founder is 28, Pinch Media CEO is 29, Twitter CEO is 31, Return Path CEO was 28). He explains,
But as a company grows, the rookie mistakes become harder to manage around. The value that everyone has invested in the business, most importantly the work of the team, starts to weigh on everyone’s minds. The CEO’s job goes from managing the product, writing a little code, doing customer support, and raising money to managing people and teams, processes and priorities. It’s not a job that most people enjoy doing and it’s a job where experience really does matter.
Suggesting that many founders simply don’t scale into the ‘permanent’ CEOs, he is worried that he and his peers may not be “prepared to deal with these issues. They are hard. And each one is different. But in order to build the best companies we can, we need to get the people side of the equation right.”
