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Comment by npt4279 | Hacker News Reader

Ha! This is the opposite of my hypothesis that I blogged about a few days ago: Founder-CEO's outperform non-founder CEO's.

https://medium.com/nick-tommarello/my-strategy-for-investing...

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They may both be true - this study was limited to the 1500 largest firms from 1993 to 2012. I'd guess the majority of those CEOs weren't founders.

If you wanted to do an interesting followup, repeat this authors analysis but compare results between founder CEOs and non-founder CEOs!

That would be a cool idea. But I'm not sure the numbers of founder-CEO companies are large enough to make any conclusive determination. If you are limiting it to tech, I'd think the outliers of Apple, Amazon, and Google would destroy the competition.

Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway, FedEx, News Corp, Oracle, Microsoft under Gates, Intel under Moore and Grove, ...

Perhaps you can do a similar study for owner-managed vs owners and managers being different persons (like in a public company).

Survival bias. Most founder CEOs go down with the ship before they get on your radar

Neat strategy. It would be interesting to actually browse through the study's data set and isolate Founder-CEO companies. If there's any conceivable link, then maybe that explains the 30%? However, I don't think there would be many founder CEOs within the dataset.

Difficult to correct for survivorship bias too (unless the study specifically did so - I couldn't get the full text)

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