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Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

Further color for folks who aren't familiar: he's also one of the most prolific and highly-regarded early-stage VC's in NYC (if not the most) with a longstanding and popular blog.

Not disputing (I hadn't heard that before) just adding.

Though I will note that the chances a good founder won't make a good CEO are probably higher at earlier stages, and getting "pushed out" isn't always the wrong thing for a founder who isn't a good fit as bigco executive.

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Yeah, I will support this. I've been at multiple startups where the founding CEO was not at all the right person to manage an organization of more than 5 people and the right decision for the business was to remove them.

In one case, the founder was simply a rich kid who started the company with his family's money, fundraised from VCs, then everyone involved realized this person was luckier than skilled. It makes complete sense in this scenario for the VCs to remove the CEO but still like the business idea.

Yeah, but it's not always the right thing either. If a VC wants to give a buddy a CEO position and they sense the ability to push out a founder, they'll do it and still say it's for the good of the company. It's hard to tell what really happened without knowing the people involved.

That's the whole point of the charade, of course, but it makes reputational information valuable, especially when a founder is deciding whether or not they want to get in bed with a particular VC.

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