Founder-led companies are truly different from manager-led companies.

Zuckerberg has many more moves available than Sundar does.

Founders in founder-led companies can take the steering wheel and turn it wherever they want, and the company must follow.

This means that a founder can navigate an org around an obstacle it cannot see or understand.

But it also means that if the founder is wrong, they can crash the organization: there's no one and no thing strong enough to counter-steer.

Founders have to know how to steer the organization they actually have, and if they missteer they can do a lot of damage, waste huge amounts of effort, and possibly crash the company.

Companies start out handling like sports cars, and slowly as they grow start to handle like big rigs.

You need to drive big rigs very differently.

A sports car you can turn on a dime; if you do that in a big rig you'll jack knife.

As the company gets larger, every steering adjustment cascades out through successive waves in the company, needing to be reinterpreted and ingested by teams and then transmitted onward.

If there's not enough slack, by the end of the chain it can be high-speed whiplash.

One of the best predictors of a post-PMF founder-led startup failing is when the company grows larger than any organization that any of the founders have previously worked at.

Being the boss is fundamentally different from being an employee, and that difference scales super-linearly with organization size.

You need to experience it to have the knowhow to navigate it.

If you haven't been in the emergent politics of an organization of that scale, you won't understand intuitively how they work.