What It Takes For Startup Founders To Succeed Long-Term

Startup founders are often celebrated as visionaries—but what happens when their greatest strengths become their biggest liabilities?

They face a crucial, often overlooked problem in the startup world: the very qualities that help founders launch companies—relentless drive, rebellious thinking, and big-picture vision—can derail them as their businesses grow.

Most founders hit a leadership ceiling, and without personal evolution, their companies (and careers) implode.

“Why? Because the same people who command respect and effort also happen to be control freaks who are terrible at delegating and worse at empowering,” share Richard Hagberg and Tien Tzuo, authors of the new book, Founders, Keepers.

They add that, “The same people who will new things into existence are undisciplined workaholics who exhaust themselves and everyone around them. They can see the future, but they lack the capacity to think and organize collectively.”

Drawing on nearly 40 years of empirical research and firsthand coaching, the book offers a blueprint for founder growth and shows how founders can recognize their blind spots, defuse the “time bomb” of burnout and dysfunction, and scale both themselves and their companies without losing the spark that got them started.

As you read the book you will learn:

The differentiators between successful and unsuccessful founders.
The essential skills founders need to master to be successful over the long haul.
An examination of the common personality traits that lead founders to make fatally flawed decisions.
What makes founders tick, including the default tendencies and leadership styles that often undermine their success.
How founders frustrate their investors, partners, and employees.
Real-world case studies of founder meltdowns, power struggles, and turnarounds—drawn from hundreds of coaching sessions and anonymous team feedback.
The three pillars of leadership that every founder needs to be successful.

Those three pillars of leadership are:

The Visionary Evangelist. This is where founders are most often strongest.

The Relationship Builder. Typically, founders are mediocre to average at relationship building.

The Manager of Execution. “Founders are utterly dismal” in this category, share the authors.

Finally, the authors explain that there are 46 core competencies required for founder success (all outlined within the book). Among them, these are some of my favorites:

Placing trust in others by moving decision-making close to the level where the work is done and by giving others the responsibility, authority, independence, and support they need to succeed.
Designing and establishing structures, systems, and processes to most effectively achieve the organization’s objectives.
Being alert to events and trends within the organization and considering how they might influence the long-terms performance of the organization.
Being friendly, open, and approachable; cultivating trusting relationships that are maintained over time.

“Founders may not be able to account for all the complexities of their companies, but they can account for themselves. It’s a difficult but unavoidable truth: to grow your startup, you must grow as a person. And that’s where Founders, Keepers comes in," share the authors.

Rich Hagberg, Ph.D.

Tien Tzuo

Dr. Hagberg is a trained psychologist who has spent the last 40 years of his career as an executive management coach for over 6,000 executives. Dr. Hagberg is often quoted in the business and general media and has been featured in publications such as Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, Inc., Entrepreneur, The Information, Business Insider and CNN.

Tzuo, Founder and CEO of Zuora, evangelized the shift to subscription and service-based business models, coining the phrase “Subscription Economy.” To empower this new economy, Tien created what became an award-winning monetization suite capable of powering any recurring revenue model. Before Zuora, Tien was one of the “original forces” at Salesforce. Tien is also the author of the USA Today, LA Times and Amazon best-selling book, Subscribed.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

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