Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do - ultimately, you're at the end.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There's a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that's the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on.
Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.
One of the perks of being the founder is that you get to build the company in your image.
Everything ultimately becomes the CEO's problem, no matter where it starts. I can see why some CEOs crack under the pressure.
In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.
I think, you know, a fellow CEO said to me that the interesting thing about being CEO that's really striking is that you have very few decisions that you need to make, and you need to make them absolutely perfectly.
We're all shareholders. These guys below me, they see the CEO taking it easy, it's their money.
You're doing a major merger, you got to hope you didn't get it wrong. That's the view of any CEO.
When I was president of the company, I said, 'Okay, I can do this - piece of cake.' Then when you are the CEO, the responsibilities multiply enormously because you worry about everything.
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.