HOW FOUNDERS BECOME LEADERS
Eren Bali is a cofounder and the CEO of San Francisco-based Carbon Health, which aims to make high-quality health care accessible to all and ranks No. 2 on the 2021 Inc. 5000. A serial entrepreneur, Bali previously co-founded and led Udemy, the world’s largest marketplace for online education, with more than 50 million students worldwide.
many investors believed it took one sort of leader to start a company and another to scale it. Especially in Silicon Valley, where I work, the stereotypical founding CEO would be a young engineer who’d start the company and reach product-market fit, and the second CEO would be a gray-haired executive with a business or sales background. Then, around 10 years ago, the common wisdom began to change. Many investors now favor keeping founding CEOs