1/ As a founder you should spend all of your time on the unique things you can do which no other human on the planet can do.
Corollary: You should spend almost no time doing stuff which is already well understood by someone else.
Corollary: You should spend almost no time doing stuff which is already well understood by someone else.
2/ If there is another human who can do the thing and the transaction costs of finding/delegating/executing that are lower than your own time/opportunity cost (which is almost always the case for a founder) then you should find the other person and delegate it.
3/ Example: I am working with a super talented engineer who is building a really useful tool to help enterprises. While he is indeed a talented engineer and could build the entire experience single-handedly, I have suggested that the biggest lever for success is...
4/ Talking to customers through warm intros from his/our networks, understanding product requirements, pitching/selling the vision and figuring out exactly what to build and how to refine it. No other human can do this in quite the same way.
5/ Lots of people can build a login page for a web app. Bring data from a db and display it on screen, etc... So even though he may be capable (and he may even enjoy doing this!) it's really not the unique thing he can do.
6/ One could argue iteration cycles could suffer by not having it all in one person's head. I don't entirely disagree. But if I could either have that or 5x the customer conversations... it's super easy to figure out where the lever for success lies.
7/ Everything is a set of tradeoffs. Every moment of every day, a founder should be asking, "am I uniquely suited to the activities on my schedule?" and prioritize and outsource everything else.
