Obviously it'll depend. But if a founder/CEO turns a 3-person startup into a 500-person multimillion dollar company within a year or 2, and is responsible for a lot of that effort, then they arguably deserve the bulk of the credit.
In most cases, probably 10% or less of the credit belongs to the CEO, though.
That's the thing though: as the size of the company, customer count, and revenue numbers increase, the founder/CEO has less and less _directly_ to do with that.
If I found a company and directly hire 10 people and act as a day-to-day leader where everyone reports to me, you can say that I had a large impact on everything that happened.
Two years later, when we have 300 people, I'm out of the day-to-day hiring decisions and I'm not directly making all the deals that the company makes, I can still claim to be steering the ship, but I can't claim direct credit for much of what the company does. Sure, it was my initial founding decision that has made all of it possible, but I'd be incapable of being involved in literally everything at a larger scale such that I could take credit for it.
Here are some decisions that you might be faced with when holding the CEO job at a 300 person company:
- The New York Times has just written an article about how your company mined user data and sold it in a nefarious way. But this sort of sale is critical to your business model. What do you do?
- You hired a VP of Sales 6 months ago who interviewed better than anyone you have ever met and came with glowing recommendations, but he has missed his quota for 2 quarters. Do you fire him or do you give him some more time?
- A competitor has, completely unexpectedly, launched a similar product as yours but is charging customers half the price. Your CTO doesn't know how they could be turning a profit at such a low cost. They're very quickly eating into your market share. How do you respond?
Obviously these situations would be far more nuanced than these 2 sentence descriptions and obviously you would get all sorts of opinions from employees & advisors but ultimately making these sorts of calls is the CEOs job. Making these decisions well is not easy and it can have a huge impact on the company.
Translation: why don't many normal people have trust funds, expensive educations, the disposable income and lack of financial responsibilities to be able to work for free for extended periods of time, friends in industry, investor class connections, or some combination of all of the above plus a shitload of luck.
It's unusual for them to be entrepreneurs in anything with a high barrier to entry. Instead they have to become entrepreneurs (and take on extra risk) because they can't easily get other jobs.
Spoken from a German POV, it's quite simple: racism. When you're an immigrant and no one wants to hire you because you have a non-German family name (illegal in theory, hard to enforce in practice!), you have four options: be stuck in low-level menial work for the rest of your life, rely on food stamps/government assistance ("Hartz IV" in Germany), turn into crime life or start a small company (costs ~ 50€ or such for a fully-liable company, and for a sorta-limited company "UG" a bit more).
Also, immigrants usually do not carry cultural dead weight - once again I refer to Germany. Starting a company is not really popular here, as you will be socially shunned if you fail (even if you not end up bankrupt in the process, but that's another can of worms). Germans are risk-averse to the extreme, immigrants usually not.
Since I'm also German, I would like offer a different reason. I frequently observe people on HN talking about their "side projects", where they build a simple app or website in their spare time, and people are willing to pay a dollar a month or so, which (when summed over maybe 1000 users) makes for a decent secondary income.
When I consider such a model for myself (just as exploratory thought because I don't have a nice side project idea ATM) it quickly devolves into a nightmare where I spend all my free time filling out tax report forms so that the Finanzamt can collect taxes on my maybe 100 euros per month.
Maybe that's a misconception and it's much easier to operate a side business as a one-man show, but that's the mental image in my head, and that's also the main reason why I would be quite reluctant to even consider just a side project.
Let's see; I'm a successful entrepreneur and I had...
-trust funds - no
-expensive educations - university, but it's subsidized here so it's cheap. Almost anyone who can use a uni education can get one in western nations now.
-the disposable income and lack of financial responsibilities to be able to work for free for extended periods of time - I earned this working at a corp job and saving 30% of my income for about four years
-friends in industry - no
-investor class connections - no
-shitload of luck - hard to say. Probably yes.
You don't need the above; internal qualities beat these externals every time.
Countless trust fund babies have tried to start companies and done nothing but fritter away Daddy's money.
Anyway entrepreneurship isn't really about tech giants. Most entrepreneurs aren't starting giant tech corporations. They're just normal people trying to start a lawn care company, a plumbing outfit, a local chicken restaurant chain, a barber shop, etc etc. These kinds of businesses actually do have strong growth potential if targeted and run well. It's just that very few of their proprietors have the business acumen or desire to do it. I can name several always-packed local businesses in my town that could grow quite easily, but they just... don't.
Maybe some people just aren't interested in doing that? Many entrepreneurs don't want to be employees and maybe many employees don't want to be entrepreneurs. I think both groups should be happy that the other exists.
Because the risk calculation looks different when one has a bank account that can support one's family while working for free for a x% chance of a payout.
In addition, beware the stories of "self made" tycoons which will conveniently ignore how -- even if they didn't trigger it -- they still had a safety-net of wealthy relatives that they could rely on for emergencies or loans. (Ex: Bill Gates.)
Statistically speaking, poorer people can't afford to undertake the same risks, so they can't take advantage of the same opportunities. Once you hit zero, you can't gamble your way back.
Bingo. Tons of money can't buy you the home run, but it can buy you a stronger bat, a slower pitch, and as many swings as you need to hit that home run.
Why would I/we when between me and my wife we earn > 200k a year with 9-5 jobs? Most SBO owners dont make that much. I get to see my family and children grow. The people I know who run a small business successfully slave away at their workplace because they have to... or the last friend sold it because he burnt out after a year.
The only time one would endeavor to run a massive business rather than a small one is if you invented/patented something or provided a service that can be scaled and you need help to bootstrap it... in which case unless BillG or DonaldT is yer uncle, you're gonna be sucking on some VC's titty anyway... i. e. they own you.
And also a lot of people with "grit" don't amount to anything. They lack networks, capital or the right idea. Or they have something else that they feel is more important than building a startup: a family, work flexibility, or a hobby that consumes them.
they do. you just don't read about the successful entrepreneurs that grow their business from 1 gas station convenience store to 4 gas station convenience stores.
i don't think it really registers in peoples' conscious minds that somebody owns _every single_ restaurant/deli/store/shop/building/etc. in a city, and it's definitely not some rich dotcom guy.
I think it's basically the shrinking of the middle class and people with enough capital to contemplate starting a business. Looking at the number of business starts shows an ever decreasing number - which correlates with the stagnation of wages and size of the middle class. Also linked, the number of hours worked has increased steadily, as well as a increase in both parents working, so availability of time in households to supply "labor capital" to start businesses has also shrank.
But I'd want to see a world where headlines like "Entrepreneurs are just rich kids" cease to be, because that headline is only created when entrepreneurship is put on a pedestal and is seen as something that is inherently superior to everything else.
People wouldn't feel indignant that it is "unfair that rich kids have an advantage" at the entrepreneurship game (which they absolutely do), if entrepreneurship weren't seen as this holy grail mount Kilimanjaro thing.
I'm pretty sure people are going to continue to be pissed off about some lucky assholes winning the birth lottery and cashing in their ticket to further profit off the labor of others less fortunate regardless of what kind of media spin you try to put on it.
I'm guessing you aren't conversant with how taxation and class mobility have changed over the last 40 years. Let me save you the suspense: you're wrong.
Marginal tax rate in the US has fallen like a rock since Reagan got into government. The exact same time class mobility went down as well. If you look at the statistics class mobility is highest in high taxed Nordic countries. Low tax anglo-saxon countries are usually pretty bad at this. The UK follows much of the same ideology as the US and also has among the lowest mobility in Europe.
It is nothing weird about this really. Higher taxed countries are able to offer better public education and health care which gives the lesser of actually stand a chance of making it.
In the US the system is especially rigged. There is no free school choice, so you are forced to go to the public school in your shitty neighborhood if you are poor, while the rich through never ending donations enjoy schools with abundant resources. And even if the schools were good you would be screwed before you even get in, because the US does not offer quality child care to poor people. Research shows the years before school is the most important for future development.
I live in a poorer area of Oslo, but I could if I wanted to send my kids to the schools in the richest part of town without any extra cost to me. But it isn't really important as school quality is pretty even, through proper public funding rather than relying on private donations. Also we get subsidized child care of a quality that typically only upper middle class buy in the US.
If you don't even the playing field in a persons early years you are not going to see much social mobility.
