1. [ ]THE ROLE OF THE CEO

2. THE JOB OF THE CEO

3. The key elements
• Vision & Strategy
• Leadership
• Building a team / Executive Recruiting
• Prioritization and Focus
• Setting the accelerator pedal
• Operational management
• Culture
• Fund raising

4. Easy to overload you with too much content

5. So I’ll focus on one area where
first-time founders often need help

6. Building a team / Executive Recruiting
• Vision is easy – Execution is 10x harder
• People are what drive successful execution
• Building a management team is one of the most important jobs of the CEO
• The bad news – it involves recruiting executives
• Hard work
• Lots of time required
• Prioritizing this time over short term quicker gains is very hard, but essential for long term
success

7. What is an Executive?
• A senior level individual who can:
• Contribute to strategy & direction
• Execute operationally with excellence
• You know when you have hired one, as you can start to sleep better at
night!
• They will offload major chunks of the business from your shoulders
• Know what to do from past experience
• Can make decisions on their own without needing your input
• Can hire the rest of their team without needing much help from you
• Produce results and solve problems

8. The Temptation
• You’re the best person to do x, y, and z and know you’ll get the best results
• So you keep doing them
• Short term gains like closing a couple more deals seem more important than
the long term benefit of building a team

9. Executive Recruiting – The big mistakes
• Hiring them later than when they were needed
• Hiring the wrong profile
• Not a startup exec – not willing to get their hands dirty in the early days
• Best startup executives like to start early and get their hands dirty initially before building
a big team
• Not aiming high enough
• Aim as high as you possibly can and use your VCs to help you close

10. Final Reinforcement
• Hiring the right executives will pay back in spades
• Every first-time CEO who has completed this is amazed by what it does to
their lives

11. PRIORITIZE AND FOCUS

12. Remember the Cash Out Graph

13. Avoid Underfunding -
not enough cash to reach next milestone
Time
Valuation
Next Key
Milestone
x
Cash Out Date

14. Use the cash out date and financing milestones

15. … and Alignment

16. Fast Feedback Survey
bit.ly/matrixgrowth

17. APPENDIX

18. Vision
• Set the Vision
• Clearly articulate the vision
• Stay close to customers, sales people, customer success people
• Make sure it is working and relevant
• What to avoid:
• Don’t keep changing the vision and the goal posts
• Common founder tendency: chase the latest shiny object
• Organizations can’t get things done when constantly changing direction

19. Leadership
• Communicate the vision
• Employees
• Customers
• Investors
• Press & Media
• Inspire people to follow
• Motivate during tough times

20. Setting the Accelerator Pedal
• CEO needs to define the goals
• And allocate resources (cash) to how you are going to get there
• Ultimately there are key decisions around when to spend
• The most common mistake
• Spending too much before the business is ready in the hopes of forcing progress

21. Setting the Accelerator Pedal
Scaling the Business
Search for Product/Market Fit
Search for Repeatable & Scalable
& Profitable Growth Model
Cash Burn
We’ve given you the roadmap to avoid the common problems

22. Operational Management
• As a company scales it needs an "Operating System”
• Example:
• Direction setting
• Quarterly off-site meetings to discuss strategy and to set the high level quarterly OKRs
• Flowing those objectives down throughout the company so that everyone knows what they need
to do to contribute
• Monitoring, Adjusting and Fixing where needed
• Set of KPIs – the metrics that really matter
• Regular meetings to review KPIs, discuss progress and resolve issues
• Dashboards and alerting systems to highlight issues as early as possible

23. Culture
• Culture has a very clear purpose:
• Ensures that every employee knows how the company wants them to act in various
situations
• Can also be used to create a workplace that gets the very best output from talent
• A couple of good example culture decks:
• HubSpot’s Culture Code
• Netflix Culture Deck