#distributed ceo

My 3 weeks of being CEO will expire on Monday and I will pass the CEO hat to Mircea. It's been a crazy and fun period for us! I had the chance to manage one "intimate" beta launch and one private beta launch. It all ended up with an awesome private beta party this Friday -- 55 beers and 1 bottle of whiskey is what we accomplished together with our Bootup Labs friends.

Since many people are asking us who's the CEO in our team I am going to tell you the story behind our "system". The quick answer is this: at Summify we have a distributed CEO - each of us wears the CEO hat for 3 weeks and we rotate.

When we started working at Balaur.ro we didn't have a CEO: we were managing our operations all together, we were going to meetings together, etc. We've soon realized that this is inefficient.

Luckily we've attended one of Radu Georgescu's talks about entrepreneurship. The talk was awesome: he made a comparison between Poker and Business :) One of the things that he pointed out was the conflict of interests between the different layers in a company: shareholders, board of directors, CEO and employees.

When you're running your own startup you have a hat for each of these layers: you are a shareholder and a director, sometimes you act as the manager but most of the time you're just doing whatever needs to be done to push the company just another inch forward.

At that talk we realized that we have to play a CEO game of some sort. That someone has to assume this role, manage day to day operations and make things happen.

Since we were all interested in being a CEO we came up with a system so that each of us gets to run the company for a fixed period of time. At the end of each week during this period the other two guys in the team magically transform from employees into shareholders and judge the CEO based on results. That's how the conflict of interests gets born and this is pure health for the company: it creates an isolated moment when valuable feedback is brought on the table, the CEO gets his credit or some kicks in the nuts :)

For us it went great so far: we are constantly making progress and each of us is improving his CEO's skills based on the feedback he gets from the shareholders. This trick enabled us to run better our startup and get a lot more things done.