The ideal founder archetype starts with deep technical expertise and product sense. They then develop exceptional business and commercial acumen over time, a rarer and more powerful combination than a non-technical founder learning the product.

While founder-led accountability is crucial, it's often misinterpreted. Leaders adopt a caricature of decisiveness, like mimicking Steve Jobs' harshness, which leads to micromanagement and alienates talented individual contributors who are key to scaling.

A key trap for experienced founders is assuming success in one domain translates to expertise in another. This temptation toward arrogance is amplified because their teams are less likely to question their judgment, leading to flawed decisions in unfamiliar areas.

While domain experts are great at creating incremental improvements, true exponential disruption often comes from founders outside an industry. Their fresh perspective allows them to challenge core assumptions and apply learnings from other fields.

Ryan Holiday uses Elon Musk as a case study for how genius can curdle. When a brilliant leader stops receiving challenging external inputs, surrounds themselves with sycophants, and starts to believe their own hype, their decision-making faculties degrade, leading to poor outcomes and a loss of wisdom.

Tech leaders, while extraordinary technologists and entrepreneurs, are not relationship experts, philosophers, or ethicists. Society shouldn't expect them to arrive at the correct ethical judgments on complex issues, highlighting the need for democratic, regulatory input.

Leaders who were correct once in a specific area, like mobile UX in 2015, tend to believe their expertise is universally applicable. This cognitive trap leads them to make poor, unsubstantiated decisions in new domains like AI strategy.

The intense, unreasonable passion that fuels hyper-growth is the same trait that can lead a founder to make reckless, company-threatening decisions. You can't have the creative genius without the potential for destructive behavior. The same person who clears the path can also blow everything up.

An engineering background provides strong first-principles thinking for a CEO. However, to effectively scale a company, engineer founders must elevate their identity to become a specialist in all business functions—sales, policy, recruiting—not just product.