How To Make The Switch From Founder To CEO

Key Takeaways

we'll go hey everybody welcome to today's chat i have an incredible founder who has an amazing story who is based in hong kong built an incredible company that is actually global now and he'll be telling us a little bit about his business and the main topic we want to talk about today is transition moving your mind and mindset to a different role within your own business which is something i think a lot of people struggle with i have myself struggled with this moving from let's say the founder role to a marketing role and accepting that maybe at the beginning of building a business you are a generalist as a founder we're often good generalists we can cover a lot of ground and becoming specialists and accepting that process we'll debate this i would and would be discussing this and i would like to welcome levine uh to uh the screen and to to the stage is how we used to say it i guess and um and thank him for sharing his knowledge with us today and maybe ask him to kick off by telling us a little bit about his business and himself and what he'd like to talk about today so laureen over to you sure i just double checking you can hear me we definitely can it wouldn't be the same any audio these days it's not the same if you don't say can you hear me okay great please hi everyone uh first and foremost thanks uh simon always a pleasure to be chatting with you i learned so much from our conversations and uh i've watched a lot of your episodes um on the podcast a really really strong believer of what you do and happy to do a quick 30 second intro and jump into some some topics of discussion so i grew up in hong kong um i went to the us to start my career uh in finance i used to work at a firm called lazard doing investment banking i was a good start to my career but i found that you know we talked about purpose the real purpose for me was leaving a job and going to africa and building some schools uh yeah when i was 23 i had left wall street i had like a thousand us dollars of savings left um after traveling the world for about six months and really just absolutely amazed and mystified by how beautiful education is in terms of impact creator for economies for individuals for enterprises and really just for communities so over the last four and a half years i've been building accelerate it's a education to employment platform that's all about solving the human capital and skills gap in cutting air cutting edge areas that are related to the future of work so we've upskilled and rescaled thousands of people um hopefully very soon in the millions but uh the key thing is millions of people are losing their jobs millions of people are needing to get into new roles uh millions of people need to learn new skills in areas like data privacy or or growth hacking with tick tock or um you know software engineering product management design ui ux metaverse vr ar i mean the list goes on um and most of the world is really just not ready especially in asia from a talent in a human capital an education systems standpoint so we're a platform that's trying to solve that um and accelerate the human race by accelerating education systems this is one of the many reasons living i love what you're doing we're very aligned i also almost have a sense of fear for the future because we're not prepared for the change that's coming everybody says don't worry you know new job will replace the old which has been what's happened in history but i think it's such an advanced change now that we need to be a more advanced system for training people for that change and give people um the tools they need and education is totally broken not prepared at all i've got a four-year-old in school right now and you know it took me took me two years to find a school that i think is thinking a little bit ahead and giving my son what he really needs as opposed to just following what was built 100 years ago um to make you you know a good factory worker at ford yeah yeah so and i can't i think a key thing of what we're doing is really focusing on oh yeah you can burn stuff but how can we get you jobs at top companies right like google's and microsoft but cutting-edge companies and blockchain or or fintech or what have you so connecting learning to what the industry needs right connecting learning to where the jobs are where the outcomes are making it fun making it exciting for you to build projects um so that you become marketable and and you can stay ahead in a web 3 future of work world yeah and this is the only area where we we slightly differ i mean i i want people to work for themselves i want people to to not work for someone else but i think that the two can coexist i think um there will always be companies and there will always be jobs for people in companies i do think it's a diminishing space which is probably why they need more training to be able to get access so so i i see i see room for both but i i'm a big advocate of you know don't work for someone else work for yourself work with people like i i work with companies and i love i love that but i do think that i want everyone to have informed consent you know everyone have the ability to start their own business as they can but anyway i think um i think what we we i love i love the way you think now i really wanted to get into this particular subject that is transition subject and i know it's something you know as as a high performing founder someone that's built a really successful business i wanted to hear you know your your view and like what is the difference for example this is a question our audience asked between a founder and a ceo and talk a little bit to that yeah and it's it's two very very different roles and it took me by surprise so that's why i'm really glad that we're having this conversation you almost have to completely change your identity uh change how you spend your time change your sort of mental head space change how you um you know communicate to the organization but in in very simple terms right founders are anywhere between 0 to five ten fifteen people and you're finding product market fit you're you're figuring things out you're very generalist and um you know if something happens with uh the server you're the one that goes and fixes it if one of your websites is down you're gonna go over to your engineer and uh hey what's going on uh when you start to scale so you know we scaled really fast last year from 15 odd people to close to 45 50 people and multiple jurisdictions and multiple locations and we continue to scale really fast suddenly you know the role in the way you spend your 24 hours in a day doesn't work suddenly you get a wall suddenly you have to reinvent everything about yourself um and it's not something that you can really learn from a book and it kind of just slaps you in the face one day and you're like you're doing too many things that a founder would which is new opportunities and new panels and new conversations and new partnerships and new whatever right all the exciting things that we all love right as founders and i know you and i have talked a lot about this but as a ceo you have a machine that's working and so your number one responsibility is to remove all the obstacles that prevent it from working better as opposed to figuring out five new machines and new ideas and all and that's really hard i love getting involved in new things i love i mean we all have shiny object syndrome in some way we love getting excited about new courses new products new locations that the new isn't something you can afford to do as a ceo right you have 50 staff you have people's salaries you've you know um careers to build for people you have to think differently about culture you have to build about a leadership team executives like recruit a ceo recruit um you know vps think about com structure think about you know succession planning think about um as a ceo single point of failure the machine you have what could cause it to break and um i would have to say i'm still learning i'm trying to learn as fast as i can how to be a much better ceo than a founder because we have those tendencies right no matter how big the company is to get too excited about too many things and build new machines and i guess what i've learned the number one thing is it's more about saying no to things than saying yes to things the difference between founder and cdo yeah and i think sometimes a lot of people that our founders are ceos i have been in the in the 19 companies i've started i've given myself that title 12 times so uh it totally you know almost feels natural to say i'm the founder and ceo um what's interesting is that i interviewed ben francis who is the founder of gymshark which is now a two billion pound company uh he um he he's very interesting because he he said look i got the company to a certain size and then i realized that you know there was someone that would be better at being a ceo than me and so he brought someone else in i mean the google founders did this as well they brought in a ceo right and and of course mark zuckerberg is famous for not doing that he's like this business card is ceo or something right he's like kind of sticking it to the man um which is ironic uh because i think he is the main man he stays but the point i'm trying to make is um that that transition can come in many forms can't it can be that you recognize in yourself that perhaps you shouldn't be the ceo uh and it sounds cool at the beginning but in reality you don't have that skill set what you're saying which i think is really interesting is is you you know your weaknesses and strengths you're a brilliant founder there's no i i've known you for you know long time and watched your journey you are a brilliant founder and now you're saying i'm learning to be a ceo so that that feels like a conscious decision not to go and hire someone to be a ceo but to become a good ceo is that is that a fair interpretation yeah and why not hire a ceo why why why we train is isn't it really hard like i'm like that i love starting new things like i'm i'm looking at all sorts of web tech we're free technology at the moment thinking yes yes yes you know like i'm not saying no no no is it is it are you literally having to change change your dna to do that i think it's about identity transformation and um i do think at a certain point you know accelerate when it's 5 000 people um maybe two dozen people someone else will be better at running the company but i find a lot of people um run away from problems and challenges and i found it really hard to start to evolve um into a ceo and actually the harder it was and there was a mindset and shift oh i can't i can't build another project right now i can't launch another product right now as much as i want to the founder and me will will just jump on it and and fill my day with it but the ceo and me is like hey you know what's kpis like what's okr's like right what's going on this month what are the obstacles right day to day and so i went for um plan b which is i still believe that i'd be you know someone that can learn um how to be a great ceo um but i have the support and guidance of an experienced leadership team uh my ceo is an incredible guy right we've got chief product officer heads of engineering and so i built a really great leadership team that allowed me to um free up time to do things that were really important fundraising or international expansion or recruiting executives and jeff bezos talks a lot about this right when you really make the transition from founder you say yes to everything to ceo you want to be doing things that only you can do right so it's like an example of type 1 reversible decisions and type 2 that are irreversible if you hire someone like a junior person it doesn't work out three six months later well that's what probations are for if you take you know 10 million dollars of funding that's something only the ceo can do so you have to step up to the challenge and the problem and and say well i'm going to own some of these very difficult things and learn to be very conscious of passing everything that someone else can do to someone else like a leadership team and focus only on things that you can do it's a really good insight i think it's actually really hard to know what to delegate and what not to delegate and i think as a founder if you built the company from scratch again i'm just thinking of my own weaknesses in this area you end up thinking i'm the only one who can do that for a lot of things and so you know it could be for example sales you know in my case i'm the only one who can do that i've got the relationship with the clients and then they're like my key team oh they want to negotiate salary or they want to catch up i'm the only one who can do that i hired them you know and you can get trapped can't you by your own limiting beliefs it's like a way of thinking that's very wrong yeah limiting beliefs alongside you've literally made it that way you deliberately built the company so you're not replaceable and then you can't scale and you wonder why right self-sabotage even oh you don't even get me started yeah you you want to make yourself i mean everyone hears about how steve jobs got kicked out of apple you can't have imagine you can't imagine it can you how can but in a way he that was possible because he did a good job building that company in a way right you kind of he made himself it made it possible to get rid of now of course they didn't understand what he actually brought to the table hence he had to come back but sometimes that's the danger isn't it if you if you become a ceo in fact quite often is a role a lot of people could do you could be replaced something you think about i want to be replaceable it means i've done my job properly as a founder right why why do um parents at a certain point they're okay for their kid to go to college and all they have to go live their lives um without going too far down the baby analogy um no but but all jokes aside i think what's really important is a very strong self-awareness an internal compass right you have to be honest with yourself okay yeah it's really hard making the transition from founder to ceo do you even like the world do you even want it right are you being stubborn or should you go recruit um a real ceo do you think you can do what's best for the business not for your ego but being detached and being objective trying to like put yourself outside of yourself and say hey this is how this guy is spending 24 hours of his day this is good right this is a good allocation time i'm having fun i enjoy building things great we'll continue to be the ceo some people they find it miserable right and there's a lot of things that are increasingly burdensome increasing responsibility is not for all founders right it's it's it's a very different skill set that's what i'm gonna say it's a very different role it's a completely different skill set um and it's not for everyone to to be able to make that leap but i do think the ones that can make that leap will end up being like really really great ceos because they have the passion and they've seen both sides and um i think it is you know jeff bezos is an example of someone who made founder the ceo i do think it is possible but you have to be honest with yourself do you want to do that um there's a lot of memes flying around at the moment about jeff bezos um transitioning from silicon valley to miami and how that he dresses like differently now but anyway that that's kind of a meme thing but i think i've got one more i think quite important question to to ask you and talk about and then what i'd like to do is is move over to discord and anyone that's got a question there can come up on stage and ask so if you've got a question about this subject or transition and we'd like to discuss it or you'd like to you know and just ask a question about it put up your hand now and and then i'll um i'll bring you up on stage but just uh you know this this we asked our community things they wanted to know about this subject of transition and and your experience and one of the things that came up from a lot of people is how do you prioritize your mission and business goals i mean i think you're touching on it a little bit there you what you're saying and your last uh comment was this concept of like the business mission is more important than your ego right the business goal and purpose is bigger than your personal need for power and that's when you know you've got a real purpose right that's kind of mission driven leadership key but how do you decide you know how do you prioritize the mission and business goals how how do you think about those things as a ceo is that yes thinking yeah no no that's a good question um i think too often people get really focused on self-improvement or little incremental improvements right um in a company for example let's focus on growing sales five percent this month growing profitability by 50 basis points next quarter and i think that's really really important but i think as a well established ceo like uh what what i would hope i start to really get good at is being able to dance between the polarities okay so what do i mean by that in one moment i have to be able to talk to an investor and say you should invest 10 20 30 million dollars with us because we're going to change education forever vision markets like australia singapore teams rollout platform product roadmap and i need to be able to without a second hesitation if they pull up a model or in my next meeting someone in my marketing team says hey what do you think about this ad copy and the way we phrase these last three words micro right so in any given moment i need to be able to dance between the two polarities macro and micro right for the vision and mission i need to be able to dance between profit well we need to have a lot of profit to be able to afford raises and afford um you know good returns to our shareholders and and uh profits for company junk parties uh but also purpose right and if you're too purpose driven and you're thinking more and more about changing the world impact education scholarships well you might not be able to make payroll or run out of time uh in in securing funding and i've been caught in this as well right as i was making the transition i was so focused on certain things that i've realized you had to step up and have a cash committee or be looking at working capital right cash collection and it's very different to a founder who's like i didn't get the first sale i just need the first sale you got to build systems tools and processes even faster by separating yourself so in that one moment again polarities right when you look at cash and and financial planning you don't have to do that as a founder but as a ceo you not only have to be able to look at the immediate what's needed right now but also what will get you to your main goal so i guess what i'm trying to say is a good ceo is able to prioritize his mission but also prioritize the profitability um he's able to go macro with an investor and then two minutes later go micro on three keywords in a seo analysis meeting um one last piece then right is being able to think very wide hey what are the new industries products courses locations but also think really focused how much cash will we need to launch in this location um how much cash will we need to acquire our first million users being able to go wide and deep being able to go macro and micro being able to uh think that purpose and profit it's it's this dynamic polarity um that the opposite um i think that that's what really great ceos do they're great listeners and they're great talkers on a tedx page all right so i guess that's does sound very similar to a great founder though yes and no um do you know what i want i want to ask you a few questions about this because it opens up another can of worms let's jump over to discord and carry on this conversation and then see if anyone wants to come up and add their two cents in the discord community that's waiting so i'm going to stop this recording anyone listening can now jump over to discord and if you're not in our discord community you definitely should be and we'll be debating this further so we'll see you there