The role of a CEO at a startup.
(imho)
Although there are as many CEOs as there are startups out there (maybe even more as some even have Co-CEOs), the role of a CEO tends to have some common characteristics associated to it — at least in term of headline expectations related to duties and responsibilities. For example, it’s typically the person setting the vision, the one in charge of fundraising and who deals with investors, the guy or girl who drives 80% of the corporate culture, or even the person who’s in the press or dealing with PR. Sure, that’s probably true for +90% of the cases.
Not only has a lot has been written about it but most of these responsibilities are generally well understood by most stakeholders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. So then, why am I writing about this? The original inspiration came from two sources.
First, in coming up with this particular post (could have written about a few things that have been going through my mind lately) I decided to run an experiment and crowdsource the subject. To that end, I ran a poll a couple of weeks ago within the Groopify team with a bunch of options. This was the result:
Second, a couple of months ago, I gave a “Ham Talk” (“Charla Jamón”) as we call them at Groopify — a monthly forum where a member of the team gives a 15–20 minute presentation about him or herself and covers the person’s role, their responsibilities, what they do outside of work, where they come from, etc. So it’s a mix of professional and personal stuff. It then turns into a broad AMA (ask me anything) type of forum. We’ve found this to be a great medium to get together, to create a broader sense of empathy within the team, to get us to know one another better (ultimately resulting in us working better and more efficiently as a team) and to have some fun in the process. Here’s the whole presentation (not much text unfortunately so a lot of the content can be up to your imagination) in case you’re interested:
I talked a lot about what I do in terms of general headlines (cfr. 1st paragraph of this post) but, at the end of it, I felt like I hadn’t covered a lot of the stuff that’s behind the curtain, the intangibles, stuff related to how I interact with my peers and in teams — which, in my humble opinion, is where a lot of the value can be extracted.
So what are these intangibles? It’s a list of behaviours and actions I’ve found to be pretty value-additive in the c. 2 years that we’ve been building and growing Groopify. Value-additive from a team motivation / implication standpoint (which, in turn, leads to better performance and results). Behaviours and actions because these tend to generate the greatest engagement and leadership are unlocked by example. Just because you’re a CEO doesn’t mean folks will be aligned with your vision. Behaviours and actions will generate buy-in, roles won’t. In the interest of brevity, will try to keep it to a list format as much as possible.
- Do’s.
a) Be transparent and over communicate — an example of this at Groopify is how we publicly share compensation information (i.e. people’s salaries and their stock ownership) within the team or how all workflow boards (we use Trello) are public for anyone to see / access.
b) Show up at the office and be approachable — sure, you have a tonne of meetings, you have to win that next big account or you have a critical fundraising meeting. Flexibility is key. But getting people to see you and interact with you on a daily basis (or frequently) will ensure greater sense of ownership and a greater degree of connection with the company’s goals.
c) Provide opportunities for everyone to have some air time with you — I proactively set a personal goal every quarter to have at least one coffee with every member of the team on a 1-on-1 basis. I am happy to have met that goal over the past couple of quarters (14 person team). Although it may not scale, doing things that don’t scale is OK to lay the foundation of bigger and better things (cfr. Paul Graham’s famous post).
d) Delegate but still be on top of stuff — without hesitation one of my most important learnings. Coming from a background in Investment Banking at a leading firm where attention to detail is critical and possibly one of one’s key assets, it took me some time to get used to it. People in your team have to own what they do and delegating empowers them to do more and go beyond merely executing. You’re still expected to be on top of stuff — numbers, upcoming release dates, sales cycle status, HR plan, etc. What we do at Groopify is to have a bi-weekly management meeting/calls where we get together and share hurdles, roadblocks, concerns, red flags, etc.
e) Put in more hours than anyone else — goes without saying. If on top of CEO you’re one of the founding members of the team / startup how will people be aligned with you and the company you’re a shareholder of if you don’t give blood, toil, tears and sweat? (cfr. Winston Churchill’s famous speech).
f) Business first — be ready to make tough decisions and consider that if your decisions are making everyone happy and are not causing at least some discomfort or backlash, there is a problem. Think about optimising locally (or with a set of restrictions), not necessarily globally. Getting everyone to agree all the time is close to impossible and will slow you and your startup down. Be bold, get people to buy into your vision. Think negotiation. Think compromise.
g) Have an opinion and provide input on anything anyone asks — after all people will reach out to you to decide and put out fires. A CEO is there to make the difficult calls, to take that game-winning 3 pointer. People in your team will look to you for solutions.
h) Reinvent yourself at every table (as if you were a poker player. number 8 in this article) — Embrace transformation and adaptability and be ready to wear many hats and wear them well (cfr. an article from one of my all time favourite professors at business school, Harry Davis).
2. Don’ts.
a) Don’t miss out on teambuilding events or Friday evening drinks — these may seem trivial or for the rest of the team to bond over but they provide a great forum for informal conversation, to generate empathy and to create more effective working relationships. At Groopify we tend to go out for a beer (or two) after work at least once every two weeks and try to organise a team dinner or activity once a month.
b) Don’t have a separate office or an isolated desk — obviously not applicable to all startups, especially the bigger the team becomes (or if you’re getting a lot of visits or are doing a lot of meetings every day) but having your desk in the team’s open space conveys a sense of flat hierarchy that ends up resulting in greater alignment with the company’s goals and vision.
c) Don’t dedicate 90% of your time to PR or networking events — this is a common trap I see a lot of CEOs and founders falling into. Just because you’re the person the “outside world” identifies with your startup, doesn’t mean you have to see and be seen at all possible networking events. You can generally extract more value out of working your network on LinkedIn and getting a warm intro than by approaching someone at an event. The only events I tend to attend are those where I can or am asked to share my experience and give back to the community (other early-stage startups, bootcamps, keynotes, etc.) and I tend to follow my friend David Bonilla’s great advice and outsource the decision to my co-founders or other members of the management team. Majority decides. More info here.
d) Don’t leave culture to someone else or to its own sake — as a startup founder / CEO, you are your company’s culture (cfr. this great post by the team at First Round). You just can’t say “it will figure itself out”. Take culture as a potentially transformative asset. As I wrote in another post, culture is a startup’s DNA and what keeps everyone together and going in the same direction, through the ups and downs. At Groopify, we went through a deliberate exercise at the very beginning (when the team was made up of 3 founders + 3 employees) to define our culture, our values and our DNA. Here’s what we came up with.
e) Don’t think your take on things is more important because of your position — be scientific and always bring data to the table. Just because you’re the CEO doesn’t mean you should disregard backing your arguments with data. Avoid the “whatever, let’s just go with this” mentality as this kind of attitude will take others off-course and put data-driven decision making at risk company wide. And that’s just dreadful. In God we trust (or not) but everyone else bring data. Right?
f) Don’t be either the nice guy or the asshole — things change and evolve a lot at a startup. You’ll be killing it one day and shit will hit the fan the next. That’s just the way it goes. There are many shades of grey, so don’t sweat it and pick your battles. Sometimes you can let things go and others you’ll need to put on a straight face and just say no. Be a good person but embrace radical candor.
That being said, a couple of disclaimers: i) it’s by no means an exhaustive list and ii) it’s a personal take based on my own experience (i.e. would love to hear people’s thoughts about it and chime in with their perspective).
What is clear in my mind, though, is that a CEO’s job is not only about what gets done but also how it gets done. Behaviours and actions are just as important as tasks and general / headline responsibilities. I’m sure as the days and months go by I’ll be able to complement and update this post with more learnings and takeaways.
