If, Why, and How Founders Should Hire a “Professional” CEO

• All of a sudden, you need to focus on a different set of challenges and concerns like establishing standard procedures and managing a large number of employees.
• “What am I focused on?  What am I world-class at? What am I really committed to?”
• CEOs need to derive satisfaction from the nuts and bolts of building a company, not just building product and articulating the vision.
• You can’t just do the exciting stuff like making the final call on product and speaking at conferences, while shuffling off everything else to the mythical COO who loves doing all the dirty work and doesn’t want any of the credit.
• At 50 people and beyond, a CEO increasingly has to focus on process and organization, and that wasn’t what I was passionate about.  For example, I didn’t like running a weekly staff meeting.  I could do it, but I did so reluctantly, not enthusiastically. I’d rather be solving intellectual challenges and figuring out key strategies, not debating which employees should get a promotion, or configuring project timelines.
• The decision to step back from being CEO is a function of self-realization.
• The original team of founders was a small group of two to three people, making it easier to form strong co-founder bonds.
• “Founder” is a state of mind, not a job description

How To Stay Organized

•  how I categorize life into different areas – health/fitness, emotions, relationships, finance, career/business, etc… I believe that each area of life requires consistent focus each week.
• You wake up each day with a plan.  You are being PROACTIVE each week and designing your life, instead of reacting to things as they come up.  Planning is a vital part of success.  Things are going to come up to distract you from your plan, but you must not deviate.

How to Organize Your Life: 10 Habits of Really Organized People

• 4. Give Everything a Home: It’s easy to get lost if you don’t have a home. Keeping your life organized means keeping your things in their proper places. Organized people keep order by storing things properly and by labeling storage spaces.
• 5. Declutter Regularly: Find time each week to organize. Highly organized people make sure they find time every week, or more, to organize there things. Stuff does not stay organized on its own; it needs to be reorganized continuously and consistently.