All founders want their companies to thrive without them, but the readiness to act on that awareness continues to be one of the more uncomfortable conversations within today’s market. After all, the glorification of founders (and our constant habit of treating them like rockstars) has some validity: Visionaries are intrinsically interesting humans, wild enough to bet that people would sleep in strangers’ homes or come to a bird-friendly app to share their unfiltered thoughts every single day.
This tension — of society both positioning a founder as the figurehead of a startup’s success and realizing that succession is key to the longevity of any business — is why a few lines within Jack Dorsey’s recent Twitter resignation tweet stood out to me.
“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led,’” Dorsey wrote …
