Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work)
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- You basically spend all your time working with founders and through that, studying, you create frameworks and training and you use that in your work. I think that's what many, many founders are looking for is how do I avoid pain? - To be a founder is a state of being. It's an attitude. To be a CEO is a craft. The more founders who can accept that those are two separate things and they're both equally important to build an ascendant startup, the better all of us will be. - I'm kind of tired of talking about founder mode, but it feels like what you're describing is founder mode and manager mode. - Founder mode gets me angry. That article just got me hot. It really felt like an excuse. We were giving founders a permission to not learn the job. It's not, manager mode is bad. It's the greatest CEOs know when to calibrate which one is needed. - Something you talk about is kind of these two phases, to a startup journey and most people focus on the first phase. - Phase one is build something people want to buy. Phase two, the one we don't talk about is now you have to build a company around that thing people want to buy. - Building a company is always the same. I don't care if it's MedTech or FinTech or hardware consumer. - You've come up with this methodology that you call the magic box paradigm that helps founders think about how to lead to a successful exit long-term. - This is a traditional sales process. You build a list of the companies that might want to acquire you. You ping them and you hope you get a deal. Magic box argues that the best outcomes for early stage startups don't happen that way. You're never for sale. In fact, you have seduced a buyer. They see the fantasy, they fall in love. (upbeat music) - Today, my guest is Jonathan Lowenhar. Jonathan runs a firm called Enjoy the Work, which I've heard amazing things about from so many people over the years. Their firm has a singular mission
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