I think about this a bit as: founder time is my scarcest resource—how can I maximally leverage it?
- If we’re in the early days of being bootstrapped, I will just necessarily do a lot myself (because you have to). In that way, I’m converting founder time into $ saved, which is a high-leverage activity at this point in the company’s life.
- If we’ve raised some money, the highest-leverage thing I can do is help the business grow. So if I can thoughtfully deploy dollars to buy time (especially in places where hiring the expert will do it in a higher-quality way anyway), I’ll do that
- If we’ve started to achieve scale, the highest-leverage place for me to use my time is to help the organization work on the right things, move faster, etc. To do that, that generally means that I can’t do the thing—I have to help build the machine capable of doing the thing, and then I spend my time trying to adjust the machine.
Easier said than done, of course.