My 5 jobs as a startup CEO
Each step in my career made it harder and harder to explain “what I do” to my family. “I create websites” was the easiest one. From there I went to “I write software for companies” and to “I joined a guy who’s trying to start a software company”, maybe “I lead a small team of programmers… that is, people who write software. And a bunch of other things”.
Now I try my best with: “I have a company that helps other companies and their employees through technology”… Wait, weren’t you a programmer? “Well, also, but I mainly do other stuff now, like, stuff.”
“Oh, and I sell insurances”
A job description for a startup CEO would be something like:
Are you a natural salesperson? Are you a visionary? What about leadership? Are you good enough in doing many different things? Finance? Marketing? Product? Sales? Hiring? Managing? Developing business?
Are you crazy enough to try something impossible, but just not too crazy?
I feel like one of the most important parts of my job as CEO is maintaining some order in the middle of chaos.
First of all, I think this job is an impossible one if you don’t have a team you can trust with your eyes closed. This is your executive team, or just your co-founders at the beginning. Big part of what I do is enabling the team to do great things as well as building and leading the team itself. Here’s what my last few weeks looked like:
- 20% Talking to customers
- 20% Hiring
- 20% Working with our partners
- 20% Fundraising + talking to investors
- 20% Everything else (management, administration, random support and coding)
Of course there’s also an invisible or unmeasurable effort in leading the crew, setting the vision (and repeating it like a broken record) and infusing energy to whoever might be needing it at the time.
To code or not to code
Oh boy it’s tough not to code. I’ve been coding more than half of my life, and I really enjoy solving problems with a computer. Plus, we’re a software startup, and there’s always some critical feature that needs to be shipped.
The first few months of Factorial, all Pau and I did was coding and shipping features, working closely with César, our product designer. As soon as we could afford to grow the team, I started focusing more on “everything else”.
Right now I decide to spend an entire day coding only if:
- There’s some urgent critical thing that I could do faster than others and help unlock other stuff, or
- I need a break from “everything else” and I can immerse myself in our code, learn about our hipster Javascript stack or build some API endpoints.
Except for those exceptions, it’s up to my co-founder Pau and his amazing team to keep delivering our roadmap and building a great product.
Basic management
I’ve always been impressed by young entrepreneurs that go straight from college to founding a company and growing it successfully. There are so many miracles that need to happen for this to be successful, it’s close to impossible.
One of the easiest ways of screwing things up in this process is not knowing how to manage the team you recruit. Management skills take some time to develop, and in my experience they mostly came after working closely with senior managers with many years and different companies on their shoulders.
We’re very lucky because Pau, Bernat and myself all had to learn how to manage teams before starting Factorial. Even if we still have a long way to go, there are so many mistakes we know how to avoid, and that makes things easier.
I’m extremely happy that I had the chance to see a couple of companies grow from the inside and I was able to develop some management skills in the process. Most important, I was very lucky of being mentored by very experienced and successful colleagues.
Loneliness
Being a CEO is having a lonely job, period. I’ve also heard this from many of my friends with the same job, and even from interviews of famous CEOs.
As a CEO I have no room for excuses, I have the ultimate and last responsibility for the most important decisions. People’s livelihoods are in my hands. In addition I have friends that have invested money in our company and hell I don’t want to lose their money. There can be stressful moments, but I still want to always project positivity and energy.
I’m lucky to have other startup CEO’s as friends and in my network, to talk about challenges and share experiences. I really value this since it helps as some sort of therapy where we all share our miseries and celebrate successes together.
If you’re considering starting a company and becoming its CEO I really recommend the books “Startup CEO” by Matt Blumberg and “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. Find me on Twitter if you want to talk about them!
Next week I’ll be writing about how we are trying to hire the right team members for Factorial. It’s definitely the most important thing we do these days.
