The founder who can't stop doing the work.

At the start, founders are a doers, I am MD, CTO, COO, CMO and responsible for watering the plants. You sell, you build, you hire, you put out fires, and the company runs because you are involved in nearly everything. Your hands are on all of it, and that is exactly why it works.

The problem when the thing that made you effective becomes the thing that caps the company's size.

Moving from founder-as-doer to founder-as-leader-of-other-leaders is the hardest change most founders ever make. It is not really a change of strategy. Strategy is the part with a thousand books written about it, the challenge for founders is a change of identity. For years value was measured by output: what you shipped, what you closed, what you fixed at midnight. Now the company needs you to create value by not doing those things, by hiring people who are better than you at each of them and then living with the discomfort of watching them do it their own way.

This is the point where founders start getting in their own way, out of love rather than ego. They keep a hand on the product because they care about it more than anyone. They overrule the sales lead because they happen to know this particular customer. They stay the final word on everything because being the final word is who they have been since the first day. Every one of those moves makes sense on its own. Added together they guarantee the company can never grow beyond one person's capacity.

The healthiest version of the opposite choice is Google. In 2001, with the company already growing fast, Larry Page and Sergey Brin brought in Eric Schmidt as chief executive, a decision the press cheerfully described as hiring "adult supervision." The founders did not disappear. They handed real authority to someone whose job was to build the company around their invention while they concentrated on the invention itself. Schmidt ran Google for a decade, took it through its IPO and into a genuinely large business, and only then handed the chief executive role back to Page. It is one of the clearest cases of founders growing the company by stepping out of a seat they were entitled to keep.

Viewing the company as a whole explains why the alternative fails. In any system the leader stands in a particular place, and the place carries a function. When the founder's place changes from operator to architect, but their behaviour does not change with it, the whole company feels the contradiction. People are told they own decisions they do not really own. The second layer of leadership never properly forms, because the space it needs is still occupied. The organisation quietly arranges itself around the gap between what the founder says and what the founder actually does.

For a founder, the work of scaling is less about learning new skills and more about letting an old identity go. The doer has to release the doer. That is a psychological task before it is a management one, which is why so many founders try to skip it.

Sources: Wasserman, The Founder's Dilemmas (2012). Google's 2001 appointment of Eric Schmidt as CEO is widely reported, including Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It (2009).