It is significantly more difficult to step in as a non-founder CEO than to build a business from scratch. The new leader must contend with inherited business inertia, a pre-existing culture shaped by the founder, and constant comparisons, making transformative change much harder.

Success in startups often bypasses mid-career managers. It's concentrated among young founders who don't know the rules and thus break them, creating disruption, and veteran founders who know all the rules and can strategically exploit market inefficiencies based on decades of experience.

Managerial companies derive legitimacy from "the plan," creating enormous inertia against change. In founder-led companies, legitimacy is vested in the founder as an individual. This is their key structural advantage, allowing the entire organization to pivot on a dime based on conviction.

Great companies survive not because of a founder's continued presence, but because the founder codified a culture and operational DNA that outlives them. Companies like Home Depot and Amazon continue to thrive because their core principles are deeply embedded and replicable.

It's exceptionally rare for a company to make fundamental changes once its founders are gone. They become "frozen in time," like 1950s Havana. This institutional inertia explains why established industries, like legacy auto manufacturers, were unable to effectively respond to a founder-led disruptor like Elon Musk's Tesla.

Even with full board support, a successor CEO may lack the intrinsic 'moral authority' to make drastic 'burn the boats' decisions. This courage is harder to summon without the deep-seated capital a founder naturally possesses, making company-altering transformation more challenging for an outsider.

In school or corporate jobs, the 'rules for success' are provided. Founders enter a world with no such rubric and often fail because they don't consciously develop their own theory of how the world works, instead defaulting to shallow, unexamined beliefs about what founders 'should' do.

The founder CEO is a business's purest energy source. Each subsequent management layer risks an order-of-magnitude drop-off in that intensity. A leader's job is not to shield their team from this pressure ('be a shit umbrella'), but to mirror and preserve it to fight against organizational entropy.

Successor CEOs cannot replicate the founder's all-encompassing "working memory" of the company and its products. Recognizing this is key. The role must shift from knowing everything to building a cohesive team and focusing on the few strategic decisions only the CEO can make.