A founder explains why many entrepreneurs leave their companies too early after hiring operators or CEOs. The real question isn't when to hand off, but whether you actually enjoy running the business. If you built it based on what you thought you should do rather than what you love, you'll want out.
I think I saw a quote somewhere else and then it reminded me of you talking about this, but where founders tend to step away from the business too soon and you've seen that over and over. So you have any advice for founders on this? Because it's like, it's so cool. Let's go hire an operator. Let's go hire a CEO, whatever. And then everything bombs.
I think there's a couple of things, which is one, you often don't want to step away from something that you actually like. Seldom do I see that. You don't see me trying to step away from acquisition.com. Could I put somebody in place? Probably. Do I want to? No, I like what I'm doing. And so I think that before anyone even thinks about stepping away, think about why do you not like your company enough that you would rather be doing something else? And I think that a lot of people build companies that they don't like because they're using other people's judgments, other people's opinions. They're building it off of some book some dude wrote, right? And they're doing what other people think they should be doing rather than what they want to be. And I think that's why so many people wanna get away from their company. So I would say like, what in your company suppresses you to the point that you feel like you need to get away from it? And that would be something to figure out first. That's great.
