Why to become a founder?

David Beisel in his post "Seven Reasons To Become a Founding Entrepreneur" lists seven great reasons why to become a founder.  A neat list, nothing to add but as an man falling in love with  analogies I want to add my short remark.

My math (and life) teacher told me one phrase I've been permanently recalling. It happened when I confessed I wanted to be a programmer (it was in 1986 in Russia) and I saw myself as a geek coding complex algorithms in a big computer facility getting assignment from scientists. He said "math is a servant of science. Programming is a servant of math. Why to deal with a servant's servant?" Then we had a long talk discussing where more "creativity, variety, and control" is presented. Don't forget, it was 1986, the computers were big mainframes and our vision on "hi-tech" was not limited but blind. Though he was not very accurate and his hypothesis about math and programming are arguable I very respect his instructive analogy about servants and masters.

I'm not saying that any 'servant' profession is worse any 'master' one. But the more 'mastery' a position is the more opportunities it potentially contains to incarnate something new and non-existent. I'd define a master position as one that decides "what" rather than "how" - a destiny of 'servants'. Of course it's not black and white but a scale of what/how decisions locales, to a certain extent, the master/servant nature of a position. I think a founder is a place in a company ultimately moving one towards the master end of this scale and all the seven David's reasons  just accentuate why the founder is firstly the what-man and only then the how-man.

Comments

[Daniel Nerezov]

Hi Roman. Saw your comment on David's blog.

I too think about the difference between what founders and CEO's are supposed to do.

Heck, it's not like there is a manual.

Maybe my perspective is a bit different to yours, but I haven't found that the founder is a "what" man, in the way I think you might mean it. In my experience, many people go do startups to, quote, "be their own boss" and set the agenda, but I haven't found that to work in practice, work in theory, or be a good thing, for that matter, in general.

Founders too have a responsibility. You can't just do a startup because you feel like it. You gotta do it so that someone's gonna buy the thing from you, and so I think that acquirers set the startup agenda as a matter of principle, but also, in a day-to-day setting, the entrepreneur is never the boss because customers, employees, co-founders and even your friendly banker is gonna have a good say as to what you should and should not be doing.

Anyways. Here's what I think founders and CEO's are supposed to do and how their jobs are different.

Founders- complete the old V=PxSxE equation. Where V= value P= problem S= elegant solution and E = resources. In other words, founders create value by formulating and elegantly solving a painful problem using resources outside of their control.

An example of this would be someone going around and collecting surveys from people about why they hate a particular OS, asking them to put a down deposit so you can make them a new OS, and using the survey results and the deposits to recruit programmers to make the thing happen. That's, in my experience, a classical example of what a founder would do. This kind of approach, for using information as an asset (survey results, contracts etc..) to secure other assets (money and people) is a tried, tested and battle hardened job description for a founder.

CEOs- In my experience, the job of the CEO is to manage risks (people risk, undercapitalization, marketing risks, logistics etc). CEO's are there to make sure things don't break down....which often leads to things actually working.

Anyways...I noticed you have an interest in startups so I thought I'd say Hi.

Do svidanya.