Fire Yourself Before Your Company Does
Most founders scale the company. Few scale themselves.
I wrote a letter to my ego.
Not a metaphor. An actual letter. Pen, paper, goodbye.
It was 2017. I was 27. ContentCal had a few hundred customers and was growing nicely. And I was in the middle of everything, every product decision, every hire, every strategic call, every fire.
I thought that was the job.
I thought being the founder meant being the one with the best ideas, the sharpest instincts, the fastest answers. I thought my value was being right. At 27, your brain is still wired that way. You’re proving yourself. You’re fighting for credibility. You want to be the smartest person in every room because you think that’s what earns respect.
My mentor and Chair at ContentCal had been telling me for months: “Alex, your job isn’t to be the smartest person in the room. Your job is to build the room.”
I heard him. But I didn’t feel it. Not yet.
Then I picked up How to Be a Leader by Martin Bjergegaard and Cosmina Popa, part of The School of Life series. It’s not a traditional business book. It doesn’t talk about OKRs or growth metrics. It talks about the difference between being a manager and being a leader. About self-knowledge and authenticity. About ego and what the authors call “the forces of glamour”, the seductive pull of being seen as the person who has all the answers.
There’s a chapter called “On Ego and the Forces of Glamour” that hit me like a wall. The idea that leadership isn’t about being powerful or decisive in the way popular culture tells us. That real leadership requires letting go of the version of yourself that got you here, the scrappy, brilliant operator who built something from nothing, and becoming someone new. Someone whose job is to create the conditions for other people to rise.
That cracked something open. Because I realised the thing I was most proud of, my ability to have the answer, was the thing holding everything back. My ego wasn’t protecting the company. It was capping it.
So I wrote a letter. To my own ego. Thanking it for getting me this far. For the hustle, the confidence, the force of will that turned us into a real company. And telling it that where we were going, it couldn’t come.
That sounds dramatic. It was. But it was the most important leadership moment of my career. Because everything changed after that.
The Identity Trap
Here’s the pattern I see in almost every founder I invest in, advise, or coach.
They start the company because they’re brilliant at something. Maybe it’s product. Maybe it’s sales. Maybe it’s strategy or storytelling or sheer force of will.
That brilliance gets them from zero to one.
And then it traps them.
Because the skills that start a company are not the skills that scale one. And most founders never make the switch. Not because they can’t, but because their identity won’t let them.
When your self-worth is tied to being the person who knows, who decides, who fixes, you cannot build a company that works without you. You will always be the bottleneck. You will always be the ceiling.
I lived this. At ContentCal, I was the answer machine. Every question flowed through me. Every decision required my input. I wore it like a badge. Look how essential I am. Look how much I know.
But essential and scalable are opposites.
The company couldn’t grow past my personal bandwidth. And I couldn’t figure out why I was so exhausted until someone pointed out the obvious: I had designed a company that required a superhero to function. And superheroes burn out.
Your Real Job: Vision, Then Team
Most founders describe their job in terms of what they do.
I build the product. I close the deals. I manage the team. I set the strategy. I run the board meeting.
That’s not the job. That’s the trap.
The founder’s real job changes as the company grows. In the earliest days, yes, you do everything. You are the product, the sales team, the strategy, and the operations. That’s the zero-to-one phase and there’s no shortcut through it.
But as the company scales, and this happens sooner than most founders expect, your job narrows to two things:
Set the vision. Build an insane leadership team.
That’s it. Everything else is a derivative of those two.
Vision means being the person who holds the long-term direction so clearly that the entire company can orient around it without needing you in every meeting. It means answering where are we going and why does this matter so definitively that your team can make daily decisions without checking with you.
The leadership team is how that vision becomes reality. Your job is to recruit, develop, and empower a group of people who are genuinely better than you at their respective functions. Not helpers. Not executors. Leaders who can own an entire domain and run it without your involvement.
As the company grows, your job doesn’t get bigger. It gets narrower. Vision and team. Direction and people. That’s the work. Everything else is noise that feels important but isn’t.
My mentor at ContentCal put it simply: “Build a brilliant management team, and then get out of their way.”
I resisted that advice for nearly two years. Then I followed it, and the company transformed.
The Meritocracy Shift
The ego letter wasn’t just about letting go of control. It was about fundamentally changing what I valued.
Before, I valued being right. I valued having the answer. I valued the team looking to me as the person who knew.
After, I valued something different: building a meritocracy where the best idea wins.
In a meritocracy, it doesn’t matter who says it. It matters whether it’s true, whether it’s useful, whether it moves the company forward. The founder’s idea doesn’t get extra weight just because it came from the founder.
This is incredibly hard for most founders. Your company is your identity. Your ideas feel like extensions of yourself. When someone disagrees with you, it can feel personal. At 27, it felt personal every time.
But the moment you let go of needing to be right, something extraordinary happens. The quality of ideas in the room goes up. People stop performing for the boss and start thinking for the mission. The best people, the ones you actually want, feel empowered instead of managed.
That shift took me from being the brain of ContentCal to being the architect. And it’s the only reason we scaled to a point where Adobe wanted to acquire us.
What Changed When I Let Go
After the letter, I started doing things differently.
I stopped attending meetings where I wasn’t the decision-maker. If I was there for “input,” I wasn’t needed.
I started hiring people who were genuinely better than me in their domain. Not assistants who extended my reach, but operators who could own an entire function and run it independently.
I built a real leadership team — one where decisions were made by the people closest to the problem, not by the person with the biggest title.
I focused on three things only: vision, people, and capital. Where are we going? Who’s going to get us there? How do we fund it?
Everything else? Delegated, systematised, or killed.
The result was counterintuitive. The less I did, the faster the company moved. The fewer decisions I made, the better the decisions became. The more I stepped back, the more the team stepped up.
ContentCal grew faster after I stopped being involved in everything. We scaled to 5,000 customers, raised $14M, and ultimately sold to Adobe.
Not because I worked harder. Because I finally understood what the job actually was.
The Seven Levers of Founder Leverage
Since ContentCal, across my work at JAAQ and investing in 60+ startups, I’ve come to see founder leverage as seven distinct systems. Miss any one of them, and you’re back to being the bottleneck.
1. People Leverage
This is the most important and the hardest.
Hire operators, not followers. An operator is someone who can take a function e.g. product, growth, finance, operations, and run it better than you could. They don’t need your input on every decision. They need your clarity on direction and then the space to execute.
The test is simple: if someone needs your approval on 80% of their decisions, they’re not an operator. They’re an extension of your calendar.
At JAAQ, I’ve built this differently from day one. Every senior hire is someone I trust to make decisions without me. Not because I’m absent, because I’ve designed for autonomy.
2. Systems Leverage
If you do something more than twice, systematise it.
Onboarding. Reporting. Investor updates. Decision-making frameworks. Meeting cadences. Hiring processes. Performance reviews.
Every time you systematise something, you remove yourself as a dependency. The system runs whether you’re there or not. That’s leverage.
Most founders resist this because systems feel boring. They want to be in the arena, making calls, solving problems. But the founders who build clean systems are the ones whose companies survive their absence. And a company that can survive your absence is the only kind worth building.
3. Decision Leverage
Most founders centralise decisions because they believe they’ll make better calls than anyone else. Sometimes that’s true. But centralised decision-making doesn’t scale. It creates queues, bottlenecks, and a culture where nobody takes ownership because the founder will override them anyway.
Decision leverage means designing how decisions get made, not making every decision yourself.
Define which decisions are reversible and which aren’t. Reversible decisions should be made fast, by the person closest to the problem. Irreversible decisions, fundraising, key hires, strategic pivots, deserve your full attention.
Create a clear framework: who decides what, with what information, by when. Then step back.
When I stopped being the decision-maker at ContentCal and became the decision architect, the speed and quality of our execution improved dramatically. Not because I got smarter. Because I removed the bottleneck, which was me.
4. Narrative Leverage
Your story is a system too.
The founder’s narrative — why this company, why now, why you — is the single most scalable asset you control. It attracts capital, talent, customers, and partners without you being in every room.
When your narrative is clear and tight, other people can pitch on your behalf. Your investors repeat it. Your team lives it. Your customers feel it.
When it’s muddled, every conversation requires you personally to explain what you’re building. That’s the opposite of leverage.
I’ve raised over $40M across multiple businesses. The rounds that closed fastest were never the ones with the best metrics. They were the ones where the story was so clear that the investor could retell it to their partners without me in the room.
Build a narrative that travels without you.
5. Financial Leverage
Capital is a lever, not a prize.
Too many founders treat fundraising as validation. They raise to prove they’re credible, to get the logo of a prestigious fund on their cap table, to feel like they’ve “made it.”
But capital only creates leverage when it’s deployed against a clear system. Raise to build infrastructure that compounds, better people, better product, better distribution. Raise to accelerate something that’s already working, not to patch something that isn’t.
The worst use of capital I’ve seen across 60+ investments is founders who raise money and then spray it across too many initiatives, hiring too fast, launching too many features, entering too many markets. That’s not leverage. That’s expensive chaos.
The best use of capital is surgical. Fund the one or two things that unlock disproportionate growth. Protect your runway. Keep your burn intentional.
Capital should buy you time and optionality, not just headcount. The founders who understand this build companies that survive downturns, negotiate from strength, and compound quietly while everyone else burns through their runway trying to look impressive.
6. Reputation Leverage
This is the lever that takes the longest to build and compounds the most quietly.
Your reputation as a founder, your track record, your relationships, your public presence — opens doors that no amount of cold outreach ever will. It attracts investors who already believe in you before you pitch. It draws talent that wants to work with you, not just your company. It creates inbound deal flow, partnerships, and opportunities that would take months to manufacture.
I didn’t fully appreciate this until after ContentCal. After the Adobe acquisition, after investing in 60+ startups, posting on social media daily, after building Venture Wisely, doors started opening that I didn’t knock on. Investors reached out. Founders asked for my involvement. Opportunities arrived because my reputation preceded me.
Reputation leverage isn’t about personal branding in the LinkedIn sense. It’s about consistently doing good work, treating people well, being honest about what you know and don’t know, and building a body of evidence that speaks for itself over years.
You can’t hack it. You can only earn it. But once you have it, it works for you around the clock without you doing anything.
7. Energy Leverage
This is the one nobody talks about at board meetings. But it might be the most important.
Your energy is finite. How you allocate it determines everything.
If you spend your best hours in status update meetings, you’ve already lost. If your mornings, your highest-clarity, highest-creativity window — are consumed by Slack and email, you’ve traded leverage for reaction.
I protect my mornings now. No calls before 10am where possible. That time is for thinking, writing, training, planning. The decisions that move the needle don’t happen in meetings. They happen in silence, on walks, with a clear head.
Design your calendar like a leverage engine: what gets your best energy, and what gets delegated or deleted?
Trust Your Gut — But Know When
I want to add something important here, because this piece could easily be read as “let go of everything and just build systems.”
That’s not quite right.
There are moments — critical, high-stakes, fork-in-the-road moments — where the founder’s gut is the most important signal in the room.
When to sell. When to pivot. When to fire a senior leader who looks good on paper but is poisoning the culture. When to say no to a round of funding that comes with strings you can feel but can’t articulate. When to double down on something everyone else thinks is risky.
These are not decisions you can systematise. These are not decisions your leadership team can make for you. These are the moments where your pattern recognition, your instinct, your accumulated experience as the person who built this thing from nothing, that’s irreplaceable.
The skill is knowing the difference. Most decisions should be made by the people closest to the problem. But a small number of decisions, the ones that define the trajectory of the company, require the founder’s conviction. And in those moments, you need to trust yourself completely.
I knew it was time to sell ContentCal before I could explain why. The feeling came first. The logic followed weeks later. If I had waited for consensus, the moment would have passed.
The founder’s job isn’t to make every decision. It’s to make the few decisions that only you can make, and make them with clarity and courage.
What I’d Tell a Founder Stuck in “Doing” Mode
You’re not lazy if you step back. You’re not abdicating. You’re not “less of a founder” because you didn’t personally build the feature, close the deal, or write the copy.
You are more of a founder when you build the machine that builds the thing.
Here’s the honest self-assessment:
If your company would collapse without you for two weeks, you haven’t built a company. You’ve built a performance.
If every important decision waits for your input, you’re not leading. You’re queuing.
If you’re the smartest person in every room, you’ve hired wrong.
The founder’s real job is to make yourself unnecessary to operations and indispensable to direction. To set the vision so clearly that the team can execute without you. To build a leadership team so strong that the company gets better when you step away.
The Hardest Part
I won’t pretend this is easy. Letting go of “being the doer” means letting go of a version of yourself that got you here. The scrappy founder. The one who outworked everyone. The one who had all the answers.
That version of you was necessary. Honour it.
But don’t let it cap what comes next.
The companies that endure aren’t built on one person’s brilliance. They’re built on systems that compound, teams that own their outcomes, and a founder who understands that the highest-leverage thing they can do is design the architecture — and then step aside.
Write the letter if you need to.
I did.
It changed everything.
Excellent post. I’ve read many versions of this from other founders but rarely one that had this level of clarity.