One of the most insightful articles I have seen recently is certain by Ben Horowitz (cofounder and General Partner along with Marc Andreessen, of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz). Here is the entire blog post, with some of my fav quotes here:
List of founder CEOs…founders ran an overwhelming majority of them for a very long time, including:
- Acer—Stan Shih
- Adobe—John Warnock
- Amazon – Jeff Bezos
- AMD—Jerry Sanders III
- Apple – Steve Jobs
- DEC—Ken Olsen
- Dell—Michael Dell
- EA—Trip Hawkins
- EDS —Ross Perot
- Hewlett-Packard—Dave Packard
- IBM—Thomas Watson, Sr. (*)
- Intel—Andy Grove (*)
- Intuit—Scott Cook
- Microsoft —Bill Gates
- Motorola—Paul Galvin
- nVidia—Jen-Hsun Huan
- Oracle—Larry Ellison
- Peoplesoft—Dave Duffield
- Salesforce.com—Marc Benioff
- Seagate—Al Shugart
- Siebel—Tom Siebel
- Sony—Akio Morita
- Sun—Scott McNeely
- VMware—Diane Greene
Maximising vs finding product cycles…
These innovations are product cycles. Professional CEOs are effective at maximizing, but not finding,product cycles. Conversely, founding CEOs are excellent at finding, but not maximizing,** product cycles. Our experience shows—and the data supports—that teaching a founding CEO how to maximize the product cycle is easier than teaching the professional CEO how to find the new product cycle.
Steve Jobs and the turn around…
But remember that when Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, he was doing so as the co-founder and CEO of NeXT computer, a marginal computer workstation company which Apple purchased for less than $500M. Let’s just say he didn’t have the benefit of the doubt. What he did have: the founder’s courage to innovate despite the doubters.
I shall leave the rest for you to read on your own :)