Today a founder asked me how my job as CEO has changed over the last 11 years, I thought it’s interesting to share.
Looking back, it feels like there have been three distinct phases:
Phase 1: Product, engineering & sales. For the first 5–6 years, almost every waking hour was spent building, selling, talking to customers, and shipping.
Phase 2: Learning every function. As we scaled, I spent time acting as an IC across growth marketing, country expansion, partnerships, regulatory work, government affairs and more.
The goal wasn’t to do these jobs forever. It was to understand what great looked like, so I could hire the best people. It’s hard to recognize excellence if you’ve never done the job yourself.
Phase 3: Narrative, brand & organization. Today, most of my time goes into company narrative, brand, organizational design, to make sure we can continue to scale to a 100B+ business.
I’m curious how this compares with other founders.
Did your journey look similar?
What phases am I missing?
Which transition was the hardest?