Pinterest founder Ben Silberman on the role of the CEO as a company grows

“The founder is always responsible for driving clarity on what you’re building and why. And for talking about what the standard is culturally and objectively of the people you want to bring into the company. I don’t think that ever changes.”

Ben continues:

“I think what changes is that more and more your job becomes creating an organization and finding people that can build that and that will do it better than you and making sure that those people feel like they are a part of that mission—that they’re not building it for somebody else.”

As he grew from an introverted founder to the CEO of an organization of thousands of employees, he had to learn to communicate a lot more and how to manage people. He’s also still involved in product:

“I’m still involved in product, but my job isn’t to pixel critic the service. It’s hopefully to ask the right questions and get the teams to come up with better ideas. That’s actually I think a hard transition for a lot of founders to make but I think it’s a really important one. At some point you have to not let go of the product, but have faith that the people you’ve hired—because they have great judgment and because they’re talented—are going to execute better. You job is to unify that into a singular product vision.”

Full video: Y Combinator “Ben Silbermann at Startup School SV 2016“ (Sep 2016)