CEOs get fired all the time. Founder-CEOs getting fired seems rarer these days, though.
Two that would be hard to imagine happening today:
- Pushing Steve Jobs out of Apple.
- Pushing Sergey Brin + Larry Page “down” to bring in an Outside CEO.
A few that we don’t hear about too much:
- Elon Musk pushing out first CEO of Tesla. A necessity for funding. All the money was gone and the Roadster was hopelessly behind schedule and cost targets.
Today, tech is so much bigger. And we believe in the cult of the CEO much more.
It still happens, and thankfully, it happens a lot more often with inappropriate behavior. As it should. CEOs ousted for improper misconduct hit a high in 2018. Here’s a list of the big ones
But Founder-CEOs being ousted feels rarer outside of bad conduct these days. Especially, with control provisions, founders get now.
In SaaS, if we look at the top SaaS companies that have IPO’d, the vast majority still seem to have the founder CEO as CEO. The vast majority. And the few that don’t generally had a founder that decided to bring someone else in themselves (often a CTO type):
- Salesforce: Yes
- Atlassian: Yes
- Box: Yes
- Dropbox: Yes
- Domo: Yes
- Elastic: Yes
- Hubspot: Yes
- Marketo: Yes-ish. Founder CEO retired as CEO when acquired.
- Pluralsight: Yes
- Smartsheet: Yes
- Avalara: Yes
- Okta: Yes
- DocuSign: No
- New Relic: Yes
- Slack: Yes
- Anaplan: No
- Coupa: Yes
- Ringcentral: Yes
- Workday: Yes
- Yext: Yes
- Blackline: Yes
- Square: Yes
- Shopify: Yes
- Alteryx: Yes
- Veeva: Yes
- Twilio: Yes
- PagerDuty: No
- Zendesk: Yes
- Zscaler: Yes
- Zoom: Yes
- Zuora: Yes
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
