Sam Altman To Whitney Wolfe Herd, The Silicon Valley Founder-CEO Is No Longer Untouchable

tech.hindustantimes.com:

When Bumble Inc. announced that its founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd, would step down as chief executive officer, analyst and press reports painted her as a “great visionary.” Her successor, former Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce Inc. executive Lidiane Jones, who took on the job last week, got dubbed a “strong operator.” This has long been the plight of the professional CEO. They are the boring “tech industry veteran” while the founder they succeed gets to be the “high-level thinker.”

If it's any consolation to the former group, boring is in high demand these days. In the last year or so, along with Bumble, a slew of companies and startups including Lyft, Slack,(1) Cruise and Stitch Fix have all had high-profile founders take a step back to make room for “more seasoned” executives.

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The departures are part of a broader C-suite exodus across US business: A record number of CEOs stepped down last year. Chalk some of it up to exhaustion. It has never been so difficult and so complicated to run a company, with supply-chain woes, geopolitical turmoil, the war on ESG and “woke” capitalism, rapidly changing consumer habits, the disruption caused by new technology like AI and the battle against employee burnout and disengagement.

But what's striking about the CEO exits in startup land is how antithetical they are to a long-held Silicon Valley doctrine: Under no circumstances do you ever get rid of a founder. It's an ethos that gained traction thanks to venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which grew its business and reputation on the idea that founders should be CEOs to maintain their companies' vision and mission.

As the boom times come to an end, VCs seem more willing to trade a little less