Don't F**k It Up: How Founders and Their Successors Can Avoid the Clichés That Inhibit Growth First Edition

One of the 24 favorite books of executives, founders, and CEOs that everyone should read - Inc.com

I've wanted to write this book since my fourth experience succeeding a company founder. I was fresh off a somewhat raw departure and trying to reconcile my successes and failures along the way. I was two for four. In baseball, that batting average would put me in the Hall of Fame. But, even with the successes I had, something was still frustrating me.

About this time, Noam Wasserman, a professor at the Harvard Business School who had adopted "founder frustrations" as a focus for his research, contacted me. Noam was teaching a course called Founders' Dilemmas, aimed at helping students understand the opportunities and obstacles of founding companies and working with company founders. He had read one of my blogs and suggested that my recent experiences were a perfect backdrop for a case he was writing about founders' successors. I thought it would be interesting to have my career be the subject of a Harvard Business School case. As the case took form, an important theme emerged. If a founder was ready for change, then together we could navigate toward great success. But if the founder was not ready to accept change, it didn't matter what advice I provided--it would likely be ignored. Each time Noam taught the case Les Is More Times Four, he invited me to attend. The classes were both challenging and invigorating. I learned more about myself as well as the founders I've worked with in each session. Based upon Noam's course rankings and his repeated invitation over the years, I think students got something out of it as well. The case has now been taught at the Sloan School at MIT, the Smith School at Maryland, and other leading business programs around the world. These classes have taught me that if you have the opportunity to have your life scrutinized by hundreds of really smart business students, you should
take full advantage--just be sure you have a thick skin. 

 I've gone on to two more founder startups since the case was written, a total of six, making me the most experienced founder successor alive! My experience has ranged from taking over the CEO role from a founder in a venture-backed pre-revenue startup to running a $350 million twenty-year-old company when the founder grew tired of his changing industry. Several of the companies I led were sold for several times their gross revenue, making their founders rich.

Like the majority of founder-led ventures, each of my transitions involved the founder sticking around after I took over the CEO role. And while founders staying involved in the ventures past their succession is the general rule, it makes the situation for their successor much more challenging. Together we made the difficult adjustments to grow these companies and increase their value--although we often disagreed on the path. Three out of five ventures experienced wealth-building liquidity events for these founders and their stakeholders. Two I'd have to characterize as failures (although the venture capitalists at both would have you believe otherwise), enabling me to learn some of the most important lessons contained in this book. The sixth is still a work in progress, with a recent valuation of more than six times the value from when I arrived two years prior, inspiring me to think deeply about my succession. 

 After all of these experiences and the self-awareness that the Harvard case provided, I am eager to share the lessons I have learned with you. I know that every founder believes his company is special, exceedingly complex, and unique. I can assure you that the challenges confronting you are just not that different. Ninety-five percent of your problems are shared by other founders, which is good news because it means your problems are solvable. They've been seen and handled many times before--all that is required is the smarts and the courage to address them.