The CEO Complexes
Every founder / CEO has a complex, which I think falls into one of three types.
God-complex CEOs
God-complex CEOs see themselves as the embodiment of the purpose. They are the purest carriers of the mission, culture, and essence of the company. Their word is absolute and their means are sometimes ruthless. They are obsessed with winning — and usually inspire and attract those who are similarly type-A and competitive. These CEOs are typically charismatic and personally compelling, which leads to a cult of personality. Other talented people, especially those who prize autonomy and agency, struggle in god-complex-driven companies. These CEOs tend to win… but sometimes also flame out. God-complex organizations tend to falter due to hubris and paranoia.
Travis Kalanick is probably the most iconic recent god-complex CEO. Adam Neumann is probably not far behind.
Steve Jobs, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg are probably a mix of god-complex CEOs and the second type…
Messiah-complex CEOs
For messiah-complex CEOs, mission comes first. There is some greater purpose — a change they wish to effect in the world — and they see themselves as simply a vessel for that mission. Their organizations often feel more like movements than companies. These CEOs and their cultures are often customer-obsessed (more so than the other types, that is), and tend to attract people who are drawn to purpose, autonomy, and talent-density. Messiah-complex teams tend to stumble due to delusion and drift.
Elon Musk is the most prominent exemplary messiah-complex CEO. Others include Brian Armstrong, Brian Chesky, and Alex Karp.
Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, Patrick Collison, and Marc Benioff are mostly messiah-complex CEOs, with shades of the next type, which is…
Emperor-complex CEOs
These CEOs are company-first; they care about building large, meaningful businesses. This is not to say that they don’t care about customers or winning; every good CEO cares about those things. However, what they care about the most is creating value and solving problems — they’re relatively agnostic about which problems they solve. They’re good at building systems and machines that compound as they scale. Unlike the other two types, they see succession as part of success — they often step down after a good run. The best non-founder CEOs are likely to have the emperor-complex, too. Emperor-complex companies tend to decay due to bureaucracy.
Larry Page, Satya Nadella, Warren Buffett, Bernard Arnault are all emperor-complex CEOs.
Other observations
It’s fascinating to see which early-stage investors self-select into each type of founder.
Benchmark is overrepresented in god-complex CEOs; Founders Fund and YC in messiah-complex CEOs; and Sequoia in emperor-complex CEOs.
Intuitively, it feels like these three founder axes map to similar axes for investors: high-variance versus ideological versus systematic.
Investors who like high-variance (like Benchmark) hunt outlier founders with explosive beta; those seeking ideological founders (like Founders Fund) back those motivated by their worldview; and systematic investors (like Sequoia) favor disciplined builders of enduring institutions.
A curious trend: the correlation between these types and “fireable” founders. Benchmark picked up a reputation for “firing founders” over the last 10 years… but it’s possible that there was a confounding factor. As a high-concentration, high-conviction fund, it’s possible Benchmark needs to seek out high-variance founders because they get fewer at bats. This means they simply tended to be attuned to hyper-compelling, competitive, charismatic founders… who win big or flame out (sometimes both).
On the other hand, I’d hypothesize that Founders Fund avoids investing in these founders, because they have an explicit ethos that they will never, ever fire a founder — so they’d have to develop a spidey sense to avoid god-complex CEOs who often need-to-be-fired.
Finally, it appears many of the most iconic CEOs and enduring companies live at the intersection of the God x messiah or messiah x emperor complexes: Jobs, Zuck, Jensen, Bezos have all founded $T+ companies. It would seem even unusual, exceptional people mellow and find balance over time.