What is the difference between a founder and a CEO?
Is it tenure? Skill? Is it about proximity to an exit?
At October’s Inc. 5000 Conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Allison and Stephen Ellsworth, cofounders of Poppi. They were fresh off their whopping $2 billion exit. This husband-and-wife duo successfully launched a small company and grew it into an enterprise.
Hearing them move effortlessly from stories about kitchen-counter flavor tests to navigating billion-dollar acquisition talks made me realize something had fundamentally shifted along the way.
I later realized that the shift from founder to CEO has a lot less to do with a formal title or externals and a lot more to do with a personal choice every founder has to make: Do I want my business to be a solo act or do I want my business to be an orchestra?
Or put more simply: Is my business playing in the arena of winning Wimbledons or Super Bowls?
If entrepreneurship is about rallying followers behind you, then leadership is about building better leaders around you. That’s the shift.
Founders “play” singles tennis; CEOs play 5-on-5 basketball.
What got you here won’t get you there
Most founders never planned on leading a company. They saw a problem and solved it. But the skills that launch the company into infancy are not the same skills that build an enduring business.
Despite her supreme athleticism, Serena Williams probably wouldn’t be as successful if she jumped into a WNBA team with the same training approach she had in tennis.
The same principle applies to business. The habits and behaviors that get a company off the ground are not the same ones needed in leading a growing and thriving company.
That’s why Allison and Stephen’s success really struck me; it was clear they changed their approach somewhere along the way.
The way they spoke of their experience highlighted to me that being a founder is a calling.
Being a CEO is a choice.
And by the way, if you love playing singles tennis, that’s a perfectly valid choice—just know what you’re choosing.
As founders, we all eventually need to make that choice. We need to choose which game we’re going to play. So how do founders make that shift?
My favorite way to make the CEO shift
At the same conference, Jay Shetty shared a moment that became my favorite definition of what a CEO does. Jay retold a moment from the movie about Steve Jobs. Jobs is asked: “What do you even do here? You’re not an engineer. You’re not a designer. What even is your job?”
Jobs responds: “Musicians play instruments, I play the orchestra.”
This is the shift.
If a founder desires to grow beyond their own personal limits to become a CEO, they can’t keep doing what they’ve always done. They will inevitably have to put down the instrument they have become so good at playing and take up the conductor role.
Stephen shared his rule for when to let go: the moment someone can do your job 60 percent as well as you can.
Not 80 percent. Not when it feels safe. At 60 percent.
My takeaway is that a company benefits more from momentum than from perfection.
Or watch the business plateau at the ceiling of the founder’s personal limits.
This is the choice every founder eventually faces.
Not on stage. Not in a boardroom. In a quiet moment, they decide: Do I want to keep playing every note, or do I start conducting something bigger than me?
Allison and Stephen chose the symphony.
You don’t have to stop being a founder to become a CEO. But you do have to shift what you do.
Final thoughts
In the game of business, don’t be the player trying to score every point. Be the leader who can build a team that can win without you.
If you are hungry for your answer, close this browser and find a quiet place to ask: Am I the type of founder that plays to win Wimbledon or am I the type of founder that plays to win the Super Bowl?“
If you want to win the latter, here’s your first step: Write down everything you did this week. Circle the one task that, if you handed it off tomorrow at 60 percent quality, would free you to focus on what only you can do.
That’s your first instrument to put down.
Solo acts rarely exit for billions. Orchestras do.
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Alan Badia
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