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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This guy is the CEO. So, by definition, this is a management problem. Dwolla has some money now; they can hire people. This guy needs to learn how to build a staff and delegate. He's only done startups, and hasn't worked in a long-established company where they have this figured out.

Some founders have trouble letting go of control. They want to do it all themselves. That doesn't scale.

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Exactly. My parents have been running a company since they were both in their twenties. Starting in a country where literally no one has heard of funding or investment(early years after communism fell), they have started with nearly nothing. For the past 20 years they have been spending every second of their time at work, well into their forties. They kept growing, hiring more people(now almost 200), opening more shops, and they just couldn't manage, there's only so many places you could be in at once. Until in the last few years they hired a couple managers to take the load off their backs. Now they only need to visit our offices a couple times a week, are a lot more relaxed than they were some time ago. But my point is - they didn't arrive at this conclusion that they need managers by themselves. They always thought that if they spent 5 minutes left at the office the whole thing would fall apart. Someone else told them that they will burn our completely if they don't start hiring other people to do their work - and it worked. There's no point in having money if you never have time to spend it.

> There's no point in having money if you never have time to spend it.

Moreover, the only point of money is to spend it. They should focus on enjoyment now. They'll be playing catch up with other people who've been working to live through their forties. Ideally they'd sell the company if they wouldn't have to work again, so it's not a distraction.

Saying, "they can just hire people" is quite flippant. No matter how many people a CEO hires there is always more that they can do. Using a topic he discussed the f.ounders event... he cannot hire someone to go to it -- that event is exclusively for founders. By not attending he's missing out on a BD opportunity. Could he have hired someone to cover the BoFA or other meetings? Maybe? Maybe not -- would BoFA take the meeting with the brand new BD team member? Would that member be as effective? "Luck" is preparation meeting opportunity and as you're rapidly scaling any business scaling a team that is prepared and ready to take on the opportunities in front of you is as hard or harder than any technology scaling problem the business will face.

I do think that there's a number of things the CEO shouldn't be doing though. Who was it, Dan Kennedy or someone put it quite aptly "Your job as a CEO is to make sure money keeps coming. Not making sure the printer works or whether the office is clean or any number of things that don't relate to your main goal". Going to a f.ounders event might be part of that, or overhauling the sales funnel or making sure that the next version of the product just kicks ass. Cleaning your own office proably isn't.

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