Being a startup CEO

When I meet new people outside of work for the first time, I don't usually tell them what I do for a living. They usually think being CEO of a venture-backed startup is different than it is - especially the pay. I like what I do, but most of my responsibilities are fairly mundane. What I do falls into five broad categories - I:

1. Sell - I'm always closing something. Probably most of the other categories could be a piece of this one. Investors, customers, potential employees, etc. I'm pretty close to suing my condo board over something, and one of the emails an irate resident sent me came from a domain I didn't recognize. I looked it up, saw his company was a fit for Clickshift, and scheduled a pitch with him. I think my wife hates this part the most, especially when I can't turn it off.

2. Plan - I spend a lot of time planning, with the rest of the executive team, what our company will look like 6-12 months from now. The board pushes me to plan for 2 years from now, but that's pretty tough in a market that moves really fast and didn't exist 2 years ago. This breaks into administrative planning (financials, headcount, org structure, etc.) and strategic planning (what products to build, which partners to solicit, which markets to target, etc.).

3. Communicate - I'm always communicating something to someone. My board, media, clients, employees, etc. Basically, I'm a big conduit that gets information from one place to another. In most cases, my goal is to figure out how to get the right info between two points without my involvement at all, so that we can move faster all the time.

4. Recruit - Hiring great people is the only way a company like Clickshift can scale. I love getting involved in details, and I usually do so more than I should. This is the most frustrating piece for me - unless the problem is going to kill the company quickly, I solve it by hiring someone to solve it. Hiring the right people to solve the problems we face is a much better long term solution to those problems than solving them myself (and usually the right specialist can solve the problem better than I can anyway).

5. Manage - I spend a lot of time with normal, day-to-day management tasks. 1-1 meetings, staff meetings, board meetings, reviewing various pieces of the business, etc. Generally my goal here is to help everyone else be productive in what they do and to help identify potential problems in time for us to fix them quickly.

I think I'm probably best at 3-5, and the best CEOs are probably best at 1-2. I'm certainly stronger now in all of these areas than I was my first time, but I have a long way to go. I'm lucky to have a good network of people inside and outside the company who keep me on track.

I hope I'm not leaving out a whole area!

Related Tags: startups, venture capital