> There is nothing inherently special about someone who runs a small vs. big company, except for experience.
I think the question is, given that someone can do one of those things really well, how likely is it that the same person can do the other really well too?
It seems obvious that the kind of traditional business ceo that investors often want to find to replace a founder is not going to be successful as a starter. Let's just accept the common assumption on that one.
I'd argue that what makes a great startup founder often makes a terrible leader for large corporations. I think every great founder has a reality distortion field (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field) which projects their vision, keeps them pursuing seemingly bad ideas in the face of insurmountable odds and allows them to overcome the biases and assumptions that dominate so many business decisions.
Some leaders expand and adapt this to build great, crazy companies: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg (maybe). Often they also create a cult-like, maybe toxic, certainly messy corporate culture that still somehow succeeds.
Others can't do this: Travis Kalanick, Elizabeth Holmes, Parker Conrad. They let their "startup founder, growth at all costs, thumb your nose at the rules" attitude destroy their company culture and embroil them in ridiculous, easily avoidable legal issues.
In my experience, a corporation's culture is the manifestation of the most extreme personality traits of its leaders. There is a time, when crossing the chasm, that the exact traits that made the company grow rapidly and the founder extremely successful are the ones you want to suppress to create a stable, efficient and effective collaborative endeavor involving thousands of people: a corporation.
I think (and this is due to some reflection on my own ideas) that if you reject the idea that there comes a time when a company should abandon "burning vision" in favor of stability, process, predictability, and broad appeal, you're actually rejecting the idea of a corporation as a hierarchical system of power deployed to efficiently organize the work of thousands of people. And I'd probably agree with that. The traditional corporation needs a traditional ceo but it's a damn shame that every revolutionary startup has to end up as a traditional corporation.