The 3 Jobs of a Startup CEO

November 3, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups 1 Comment Tags: Startups, Venture Capital

TL;DR: There are 3 core jobs of a founder-CEO in a Series A+ startup. They are prioritization, hiring and fundraising; in that order. Communicating, meetings or reviews which is how the founder-CEO spends her time, are only enablers of the above jobs. They should not be confused with the 3 core jobs. The article below unpacks these 3 jobs at length. As always feedback and criticism welcome, and I would love an opportunity to improve this piece.

Moving from 0 -> 1, achieving product-market fit and securing Series A is often accompanied by the founder-CEO moving from a hands-on doing job to a hands-on but directing role. Thanks to the funding, the CEO now has the luxury of having managers take over any functional roles she was doing in addition to the CEO role.

If the CEO’s overwhelming operational focus before Series A was to do what it takes to achieve product-market fit (PMF hereonwards), typically by running experiments to arrive at the right combo of product features, price and sales channels, then her focus after Series A and achieving PMF becomes keeping the growth machine chugging. After all there is a reason that capital from Series A to C investors is called growth capital.

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