“The CEO of Automattic on Holding ‘Auditions’ to Build a Strong Team” from the April 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review (find it on hbr.org).

As the company grew from baby to behemoth, the talents that allowed me to thrive in startup chaos became, well, liabilities in the structure of a corporation.

heads down coding and building product. At fifteen to twenty people, you need to start the process of delegating your engineering responsibilities. The only way you’re going to achieve this is to absolutely trust your engineering team. Hire the best chief technology officer you can find and the best engineers you can find. At first, review all thei

The trick to being effective at this is that you have to get really good at saying no and just not doing things. There are a lot of things that are urgent but not important. The hard part of being a good CEO is that you have to be willing to let some things fall apart. You don’t have enough time to do everything well. And in practice, what that mea

When people in my company would complain about one thing or another being broken, such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all my fault. The joke was funny, because it wasn’t really a joke. Every problem in the company was indeed my fault. As the founding CEO, every hire and every decision that the company ever made happened