One third of Founders won’t be CEO

When you finally exit or IPO, will you be the CEO or will someone else be running the company? We dug into the last 127 SaaS IPO’s and looked at the data. Specifically, we looked at the CEO at the time of IPO/exit and compared it to the list of key founders to determine whether or not a founder was the CEO at exit. The data says there is a 31% chance you won’t be the CEO and 69% chance you will be. The information is below.

Whether they were the CEO or not, the founders in these companies likely did extremely well and in these cases, the new CEO clearly did a great job as the company did ultimately exit via IPO.

If the size and needs of the company outgrow your skillset as CEO, finding someone better than you at scaling the business is a great and not uncommon decision.

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