“you can be a good CEO and a bad manager I'm legitimately not a very good manager... the craft changes They're certainly going to bring a different set of like personal values right to the process of building stuff”

CEO and manager are orthogonal skills — own it

Hulls explicitly distinguishes CEO skills (vision, capital allocation, culture, willingness to pick fights) from management skills (developing individuals, executing ops). Product managers at large companies often are not builders at all — they are strategy aligners — and the skills that make a great founder rarely produce a great middle manager. Founders who believe they are failing because they struggle with people management may actually be excellent CEOs; the two roles are not a linear progression.