Dave Kashen explains how founders can structure their CEO role around what they do best. After hitting product-market fit, focus on recruiting and aligning your leadership team, delegate operations to a COO, and hire people who excel at what drains you.
CEO role is amorphous enough that you can kind of design it to your strengths. So you could design your particular CEO role around, in this example, you know, outward facing, talking to clients. You know, obviously you're gonna focus on the biggest, highest, you know, highest leverage, highest value clients. You'll learn a lot, et cetera. And then you maybe hire a COO to handle the operations or an amazing head of product, you know, to drive product, et cetera. So instead of like with your intellect thinking what's the right priorities, I think of like what are the, what are the things you really want to work on that are in alignment with the vision of the company? And then part of your priorities becomes if there are gaps then in the company where the things you've been working on that need to happen, you no longer want to work on, well then spend some time on hiring. And by the way, I mean, post— especially post-product market fit, which is most of the clients I work with— really, your primary job is about other people. It's about building the team, recruiting, aligning the team, making sure their direction is clear. So that's also, you know, often the highest and best use of your time as the leader as you're scaling is, is ensuring other people are spending their time in the, you know, most aligned way, which, by the way, includes that they're spending time in their zone of genius on things that light them up, that you have the right people in the right roles that are like excited and loving what they're doing, not just that they're doing the things that matter for the company. So, you know, past a certain point, that becomes— that generally becomes the highest priority thing to be doing. So if you're like, I really don't like recruiting or even managing people. Like I've seen CEOs then, okay, well then you need to hire people who are extraordinary at those things and then just carve and design your role slightly differently. But generally the CEO at least needs to lead their leadership team and that becomes kind of what's primary is making sure your leadership team that's running the company is, You know, that you're creating the conditions for them to, to do their best work in collaboration with each other.
