Companies still led by their founders outperform: “Over the past decade, we at Bain & Company have been studying the deep roots of the most adaptable and sustainably successful companies… We found that the companies most successful at maintaining profitable growth over the long term were disproportionately companies where the founder was still running the business (such as Oracle, Haier or LBrands), was still involved on the Board of Directors (like Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts), or, most importantly, where the focus and principles of how to operate that the founder had originally put in place still endured,” writes Chris Zook, partner at Bain & Company’s Boston office and co-author of The Founder’s Mentality, along with James Allen, also a partner at Bain’s Boston office.

Zook also points to USD 4 bn venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as being the evangelist for the concept in StartupLand, as outlined a blog post by Ben Horowitz dating back to 2010: Why we prefer founding CEOs: “When my partner Marc [Andreessen] wrote his post describing our firm, the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs… Professional CEOs are effective at maximizing, but not finding, product cycles. Conversely, founding CEOs are excellent at finding, but not maximizing, product cycles. Our experience shows — and the data supports — that teaching a founding CEO how to maximize the product cycle is easier than teaching the professional CEO how to find the new product cycle.”

Read: Founder-led companies outperform the rest—here’s why in the Harvard Business Review, March 2016.