Why CEOs Should Not Be Away from Product

The first way that companies die is from founders not letting go. But then the second way that companies kill themselves is the founders get too far away. And I felt like I had done that and I was like too distant from the product. And then, you know, there's all kinds of issues you can get into as you hire an executive team and get that to function well. And so I think there's a debate to what extent founder mode is sort of a mindset or a destination. To me, I think the destination part is pretty important. I think it's like after that learning journey, suddenly you have this conviction from having lived experience. Certainly like the Elons and Steve Jobs of the world had sort of big spans of like wandering in the desert. where they were not as cool as they are today, and they managed things very differently in that sort of post-wandering phase and suddenly had this level of like conviction and intuition that they might not have had before, or they sanded down some of their more like counterproductive instincts.