Learnings of a CEO: Wade Foster, Zapier
These types of blog posts/articles always make me curious:<p>How were these people able to transition from founders of a tiny company to successfully running and managing large (people or revenue) companies? Many of them had never done this before so how did they figure out what to do and how to do it?<p>I often think of Zuckerberg or the Collison brothers as examples.<p>They hadn't done anything like this before so how did it work out for them?<p>- Is it survivor bias?<p>- Were the ideas and the execution so good at the beginning that once the company was up and running it didn't matter if they made mistakes?<p>- Did they have excellent advisors/mentors? If so, how did they know who to listen to? (I think of the scene in The Social Network where Justin Timberlake advises Jesse Eisenberg to go in wearing pyjamas to a VC meeting)<p>- First mover advantage? (not the case for FB or Stripe as far as I can tell)<p>All of the above comes from reading this article: <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-groupon.html" rel="nofollow">https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-grou...</a><p>In it, Andrew Mason talks about how Groupon "followed the data" into offering more and more deals to the point that they imploded the company. He, like Zuck and the Collisons, had never done this before and seemed intelligent and was acting in good faith. Yet things went south for him.<p>Genuinely curious to hear people's responses.