What are your thoughts on hired CEOs replacing the startups’ founders? This is an extremely sensitive topic but let’s face it — it happens. Sometimes the founders are way too technical and look for the business person to replace themselves, sometimes they leave for personal reasons, and sometimes the investors push them out (yikes, I know).
The interesting question is how do these changes affect the company’s performance. In the end, the founders are the people who came up with the original vision and the courage necessary to risk a more stable lifestyle in lieu of a bumpy startup road. Recently we had a discussion about this at Day One Ventures. If you want to talk about something like this the good idea is to rely on facts and not just your perception.
Data
I took the list of all US unicorn tech companies (courtesy of CB Insights) and collected the data necessary to answer a few questions about each of them:
1. Are they still run by their founders?
2. If they aren’t, when did the management change?
