1/ “The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.” - @peterthiel

Founder-led CEOs have unique perspective to empower bc they understand customer pain points.

My top 5 founder-CEOs:

2/ Marc Benioff @salesforce: previously, software was sold by license, and required many up-front costs. He created a SaaS platform which democratized software to sell on a subscription basis, and made it easily deployable, benefiting its users and providers.

3/ Jeff Lawson @twilio: As an early PM on AWS, he recognized that APIs could be commoditized & that developers could be monetized. Twilio really pioneered the developer-first mentality and sales model, a key reason @stripe has scaled so quickly

4/ Olivier Pomel @datadoghq: understood the pain points of software engineers as a developer at IBM and solved the friction between developers and cloud infra admins. His focus on solving this friction has allowed Datadog to disrupt incumbents in APM/Monitoring like New Relic

5/ Tobi Lutke @shopify: understood the pain points of e-com from selling snowboards online and recognized that he could create a platform that empower SMBs. The focus on ecosystem is what gives Shop its moat and scale to offer game-changing services like its fulfillment network

6/ George Kurtz @CrowdStrike: As CTO @McAfee he saw the issues of on-prem software, which inspired him to migrate cybersecurity to the cloud. He recognized that using a sensor network around endpoints would offload computing power and that he could sell on a per-endpoint basis.

7/ These are my tier 1 founder-led software CEOs right now.

Great CEOs know how to increase TAM, and are mission-driven to empower others and can pioneer new verticals because they fully understand the pain points.

Which ones did I miss?