The interesting thing to me is that this indicates that investors largely believe founder-CEOs are the best CEOs for the company, long term. That’s new.

I suspect that part of this is due to extended timelines to go public. Bezos never got another grant after IPO, but he owned 41% of the company at IPO. Today, it’s more typical for even successful founders to end up with 5%-15%. Taking dilution in the C/D/E rounds and going public at $3b is a different beast than going public after the B (with a huge ownership stake) and growing a public company from $60m to $3b. It makes sense that the successful CEOs who gave more away in dilution end up with end power to demand it back post-IPO.