Founders: Learn to lead

25 Feb 2025

A founder at a 100 employee SaaS company once told me that he didn’t delegate anything important to his team because he couldn’t trust them.

They had repeatedly failed to meet his expectations on key projects so when something was really critical to get right, he took it on himself. He delegated to his team, but only work that he didn’t feel was critical to the business. He trusted himself to deliver, and he had gotten the company this far. He knew he could do the work, and do it well, and he knew his team couldn’t. He said this with no self-reflection that the common denominator in the failures was him.

You’ll be surprised to learn that the company he led is no longer in business.

You aren’t a superhero

Learning to lead is a requirement for every founder. You can get by for a while on your own muscle and blood, but you’ll hit your limit eventually.

You can’t get where you are trying to go as a founder by being the world’s best individual contributor. No matter how great you are at shipping code, or writing copy, or running a sales process, you’ll never outperform a well-run team on your own.

Instead of carrying all the weight to drag your team to success, step up to a higher level. Set a vision for the company, communicate that vision clearly, and then hold the team accountable to achieving that vision.

If, after finding product market-fit, you are spending most of your time as a founder on the frontline work that you did before you started scaling, you are putting your company at risk. Your job is no longer IC work. Your job is leadership.

You are responsible for hiring and guiding a team of leaders. You are responsible for casting your vision out to the broader company and then holding the company accountable for that vision. You are responsible for building and maintaining the culture that your company needs to replicate the early success you found into perpetuity.

If you are spending all your time writing code, or writing copy because you can’t trust your team, you are failing as a leader, and your company will fall farther and farther behind your competition. Your best people will leave. Your culture will degrade.

Learn to lead. Learn to trust. Learn to give feedback. Learn to hire and develop great people to execute on your vision.

Get out of the weeds so you can build something great.

A detour

Sometimes I see founders in the same situation but not from a lack of trust in their team. Instead, they can’t make the transition into leadership successfully because the work of a leader is harder to see. Instead of looking at the code they wrote, or the sales they closed at the end of the day, they have emails they sent, meetings they had, people that they helped (or maybe didn’t help? It might take weeks or months to know).

It is uncomfortable to sit down at the end of the day and not know that you did good work. And great individual contributors often struggle with making the transition. “If I ship that feature this week, I know I’ve made my company better. None of these meetings are as important as that, so I’m cancelling them so I can go heads down.”

If this is you, know that you’re not alone. Nearly every individual contributor goes through the same thing when they transition into a management role. As a founder, you just take a different path to the same set of challenges.

You can overcome this by understanding that your success is now your company’s success. The timescales are longer. The achievements are more abstract. However; once you learn to shift from “I did a good job” to “we did a good job”, you might find that there are just as many things to celebrate. Hard conversations that you navigate well. People you take a risk on that blossoming at your company. Cool things your team ships that weren’t even on your radar.

Wrapping up

Learning to trust people is hard. Learning to recognize and accept your own shortcomings as a leader is hard. Shifting from doing things to leading people is hard.

It won’t happen overnight. But if you aren’t leading your team as a founder, you are putting your company and the jobs of every person that relies on you at risk. Put in the work, make the switch.

For further reading on role change you have to make as a founder after you find product-market fit, try this from Jason Cohen: Explore vs. Execute