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Technical skill carries a founder through the first stretch. Years of a PhD spent proving theorems in a basement build real depth, and then the job turns into strategy, people, and forecasting: looking six months, a year, or two years ahead and planning for it.
Managing people is the most important part of running a company.
Early on, a company fills with experiments that waste time. The degree of focus required is extreme, which means choosing the right one or two things, going very deep on them, and skipping the expansion into things that aren't working.
Why does focus matter more as companies grow?
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he cut a sprawling product line down to a grid of four products: a desktop and a portable, each in a consumer and a professional version. Apple had been selling around 15 desktop models, many of them near copies of one another. The cut let engineers and marketers concentrate on a few releases. Apple's later growth built on that narrower line.
Why is the jump from builder to manager hard?
Andy Grove, the longtime Intel executive, argued in his 1983 book High Output Management that a manager's output is the output of the team plus the neighboring teams under their influence. That definition moves the measure of success from personal work to other people's work. Technical founders spend years being measured on what they build themselves. Grove's book remains a standard text for first-time managers in the technology industry.