Jason Caplain recently pointed me to a post by Ho Nam on the Altos Ventures blog about the habit of venture capitalists to replace the founding CEO of the companies they fund.

It’s almost a rite of passage in Silicon Valley. As a founder, you
start a company, get VCs to fund you, recruit a "world class"
management team…and eventually, find your replacement (or get ousted).

What people seem to miss, however, is that just about every great
company ever created – in technology as well as low-tech, was built by
a founder (or a CEO who happened to join the company very early in its
growth phase) and a team of dedicated people who grew with their
companies.

I don’t believe in "world class" management in the generic sense. "World class" in what??

What I believe in is people who learn on the job and become – over
time – the best at what they do. Along the way, they make plenty of
mistakes. But that’s part of the learning (and perhaps the luck of it –
because the mistakes happen to be not fatal for the survivors).

Think about it. Some examples of great companies led by founders for
decades are GE, UPS, FedEx, Wal-Mart, Southwest Airlines, HP, Intel,
SAP, SAS, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, Dell, Qualcomm,
Broadcom, Nvidia, Dolby, Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, etc.

Ho has a point.  His most important one being that if you are going to be build a truly great company, bringing in outside management rarely gets you there.

Something to think about when folks start asking you what you see as your role in your company when you are on the money trial.