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Role, not job
Peter Rahal treats founder as a role, not a job. You never hire it, so it has no function in the company, and he thinks people abuse its power. Everyone has a role and duties, and either you do them well or you don't. His own title is chief executive.
Founding teams change
His own co-founder is no longer at the company. Most founding teams never scale to the promised land, because the team that gets a company started through each life cycle is usually not the same group of people. Of two, three, or four co-founders, usually there is one, and it takes time to reveal who.
Same job, same goal
Bending Spoons, with four founders, drops the term too: all of them have the same job, doing whatever is best for the company. At AppLovin, when a co-founder who may have had the skills to be CTO early on could not keep up, Adam Foroughi framed the conversation around what was best for the company.
Why do founding teams change as companies grow?
Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman, in his 2012 book The Founder's Dilemmas, drew on data from thousands of startups to show that founding teams often lose members and founders often give up the chief executive job as the company grows. The skills that start a company differ from the ones that run a bigger one. He found these changes were common rather than exceptional.
Why can great performers fail in bigger roles?
The idea was named the Peter principle by Laurence Peter in his 1969 book. A 2019 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue, using data from sales workers at 214 American firms, found that firms promoted their best salespeople to manager, and that those promoted tended to be weaker managers.
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