alt Hacker NewsThere’s a fallacy that successful companies are only successful because their CEO was a “rare breed” and that failed companies fail because their CEO didn’t have some innate quality.
This isn’t true. It’s easily shown to be not true by looking at all of the CEOs who had success with one endeavor and then failed all of their following startups, or the other way around.
A lot goes into founding a successful company. Not all of it is in anyone’s control. Not everything can be overcome by a CEO with powerful motivation.
Some times the market moves in ways nobody could have expected. I even worked at one startup that was destabilized and ultimately failed due to a natural disaster.
Looking back at the startups in my past, some of the worst CEOs were the ones who paraded around their ideals about failure not being an option or who pretended that they could get the company through anything through sheer force of their will and the power of their dream. One CEO who was all about “never give up, never surrender!” thinking ran the company into the ground because he refused to let us pivot after the initial idea didn’t get traction in the market but some other features were getting a lot of interest.
Some times knowing when to call it, move on to the next thing, and stop stringing your employees, investors, and customers along is an important CEO skill.
I know one who spends the days seemingly not doing antthing. He spends like a month with his own thoughts and comes up with truly bizare things that work.
In one instance he raised the price of something by 1000 times without adding anything extra. His explaination was that it would build the right community. In his opinion people were to negative/sceptical and talked to much about what things cost.
Cost him 90% of the customers innitially then grew by 100ish%. As if some high end comedy the 90% said it was to expensive and that it would never work. The other 10% really needed to see what would happen.