- The philosophy of "do things that don't scale" suggests that CEOs and co-founders should focus on doing low-status, unpleasant tasks.
- This goes against the traditional image of a CEO as a visionary and powerful figure.
- At the early stages of a startup, the CEO's job is to make everything happen and be personally accountable for the entire system.
- Many founders mistakenly try to emulate successful late-stage CEOs like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, but the approach should be the opposite for small startups.

In the do things that don't scale philosophy, the job of the CEO and the job of the co-founders is to do the shittiest, worst, low status work you can think of.

It's the opposite of whatever your mental model when someone says the word CEO and you're like, oh wow, CEO, visionary, you know, you know, powerful.

It's like, no, like you're like doing the shit work.

And you've got to learn to love and embrace the shit work.

That is your job at a pre-product market fit startup is to actually make everything happen and to be personally accountable for making the entire system run end to end.

And we just see so many founders that think it's their job to be like at the late stage, you know, they're emulating what they think Elon Musk is like or you know Mark Zuckerberg or something but when you're a really small startup it's the exact opposite in every way.


Speaker 0: In the do things that don't scale philosophy, the job of the CEO and the job of the co-founders is to do the shittiest, worst, low status work you can think of. It's the opposite of whatever your mental model when someone says the word CEO and you're like, oh wow, CEO, visionary, you know, you know, powerful. It's like, no, like you're like doing the shit work. And you've got to learn to love and embrace the shit work. That is your job at a pre-product market fit startup is to actually make everything happen and to be personally accountable for making the entire system run end to end.

And we just see so many founders that think it's their job to be like at the late stage, you know, they're emulating what they think Elon Musk is like or you know Mark Zuckerberg or something but when you're a really small startup it's the exact opposite in every way.

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Startup founders have to do a lot of… everything.