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It's probably an anti-pattern. The only great example, Steve Jobs, took the CEO title at Pixar but my sense is that he played more of a Chairman's role there, he only really did the full CEO thing at Apple.

Even Jobs had to neglect huge portions of Apple itself to focus on developing new products like the iPhone.

One reason it probably can't really work very well: http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html

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I think Jack Dorsey (and now Justin Kan) are pretty good examples, too. Why are you excluding those two?

Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla Motors is also a good example of a successful multitasking founder.

Because neither has proven that it can work yet.

I can think of multiple counter-examples as well. People who are trying to run multiple organizations and doing rather poorly (as judged by results). I wouldn't want to single them out publicly though. Besides, it's rather difficult to judge the cause and effect for things like this.

I agree that it is hard to focus on multiple things. Certainly I am not "running" Justin.tv/TwitchTV by any means: my cofounder Emmett Shear is in every sense of it. I don't think I could have a day to day operational role at two companies. At JTV/TTV I focus on providing value by advising those people who are in operational roles.

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