So, while I hadn’t ever managed a team before, I had had a lot of leadership experience growing up, whether it was playing sports and being captains of teams or being class president in high school or things like that. Leadership is something that I’ve always been a part of, whether it was Greek life at Duke where I went to school.
So, it wasn’t necessarily that part of management or leadership that was interesting, but the thing that’s really different is when I was at LinkedIn and I was working in sales on one particular thing at a much larger company, you know, the job as CEO is so different. The way that I’ve distilled it down from my mentors, I really think the job of a CEO is five things.
Number one, it’s finding product market fit. Are you making something that your customers want to buy? And if so, figure out how to do more of that, and if not, don’t worry about anything else until you figure out what that is. Two, it’s building a world class leadership team. As the founder, at one point, you do everything from taking the water out, to raising money, to every possible job at the company; HR, finance, nothing isn’t your job. But then as you scale, and you’re able to hire people to do things better than you are, you need to make sure that you’ve hired people that are better at what they do than you doing that, and you want that all over the place.
You know, third for me is really all about: mission, vision, values. Can you as a leader, explain to people where we’re going? How we’re going to do it? And why it’s so important to do that? Fourth is employee engagement. Do your employees feel that they’re doing the best work of their life working with you? If they feel that, if they feel they’re doing the best work of their life, if you’ve got product market fit and the business is growing, if the leadership are great people that they can learn from, and the communication, the mission, vision, values are all things they jive with, then they’re not going to leave it. And they’re really set up to do that.
And then last as CEO, of course, it’s funding. Do you have enough money to go and finance all of those four other things? And really, at this point, that’s all I do. If something isn’t fitting into those five buckets, somebody else is doing it.
