While, as a founder I'm loving this idea, I'm pretty sure an omnipotent startup diety could point out 10 where the founder ran it into the ground for every one that succeeded. Michael Dell's comeback has been a noteable failure. The problem here is a sample bias, as it doesn't make for the sort of story that Jobs/Apple has going. That's a real-life movie of the week right there.<p>There are probably plenty of cases where non-founders were instrumental in success too, in fact Google may be one. Schmidt has undoubtedly been instrumental in Google becoming the juggernaut it is.