Teaming to win featuring Don Bulens
We all know it and see it. Successful founding teams inspire people to take action, bind them around a consistent culture and compel execution around a unifying vision.
But how do you create those kinds of founding teams and is it appropriate to bring leadership from the outside? If so what is the role of an incoming CEO and how can they support the founders?
These are some of the key questions that we deal with in the process of building our startups. And so in the interview below I put some of these questions to one of the best – Don Bulens, a CEO who has multiple times joined a founder.
Don discusses his views on how to partner with a founding team and we cover the importance of things such as:
– having passion for a shared vision
– understanding what the founders and you each bring to the table
– identifying a meaningful role upfront for where you can really add value
– being respectful of and enhancing the existing culture
– how do you scale the culture and evolve people’s roles at different stages?
– aligning around the core execution components such as profitable customer acquisition
Don also shares honestly his learnings from the challenges and relative failures of Radnet and Trellix as compared to the successes of Equallogic and now the rapid growth of Unidesk.
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