Founder & CEO can never be the same person.

We all give ourselves the title “Founder & CEO” once we start a company and begin hiring the first employee, simply because there are no other titles to choose from, albeit the innate contradiction in these titles. After all, the job of the Founder contradicts the CEO’s position, as one injects risks to the business while the other one mitigates risks to ensure successful execution, respectively, as pointed out in Jason Fred’s latest blog post.

However inaccurate the title Founder & CEO is, it will likely remain the default title for many who make their first step in entrepreneurship, as you will probably be the only person in the company signing documents and doing early business activities. Nonetheless, picking between the side of a risky-craving Founder and the side of an Execution-focus CEO should not be a dilemma for entrepreneurs because either you are one or the other, and there is no reason to be both. At the end of the day, if you are going to build something great, you need a team. Therefore, knowing your strength and what you are not only helps you in the hiring process.

One of the reasons I want to pass the CEO role of my company to somebody else is precisely the issue of such an orthogonal situation between these two titles. As the one who founded the company, I, by nature, question everything and hate playing by the rules. I think out of the box all the time, and I enjoy that. I also enjoy building things from scratch and watching the dream come true.

But, on the other hand, I hate a fixed weekly meeting and workflow, as I will constantly question the reason for its existence, and I’m a rule-breaker. A 9-to-5 job maintaining the ship’s course was the jail I broke out of when I started my company.

I could not imagine what I did as an entrepreneur was building my own cage and trapping myself in it. Therefore, the particular qualities that it takes for a Founder to build a company from scratch are very opposite in nature to those of a CEO to ensure the company operates well according to its mission statement and vision. In a nutshell, an ideal candidate for a CEO works well under the hood with a clear and motivating mission statement and constitution written by the Founders.