In Chapter 6 of 13 in his 2013 Capture Your Flag interview, technology entrepreneur Idan Cohen answers "In What Ways Did Your Responsibilities Change in the Six Years of Growing Your Startup?" When he and his two co-founders started Boxee, they needed to team up and do everything. As the startup grows, the founders keep the vision and hire more professional and talented employees to execute on that vision.
Idan Cohen is a technology entrepreneur and product management leader at Samsung Electronics. He co-founded Boxee, which was acquired by Samsung in early 2013.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: In what ways did your responsibilities change in the six years growing your startup?
Idan Cohen: Well, starting a company and being three guys in a room, and the main difference, I think is just that you are doing everything. And as-- as things grow, and obviously, along six years, it changes a lot.
I think the main thing that changes is just that you can focus more on high-level strategy aspects of what you are doing and can have actually better professionals than you doing the things that you did before. And eventually I think that as an entrepreneur, that's what you bring to the table as the company grows, is you are the one who has the vision, and you set that vision, and you need to work with people in order to execute on it, but you can bring excellent people to help you execute it and people who are, frankly, more professional than you are. And that's great, like, this-- the feeling when you recruit someone who is better than you are, it's sometimes hard, like, at the beginning, before bringing him on, but then as he comes in and he does a better job, that's great. That's the best thing you can do.
And I think that's the second part of it is actually focusing on recruiting and bringing people in, just being able to identify those key members that you want in your team and bringing them over.