Nope. Passion and a healthy obsession can be cultivated and it’s on you as a leader to bring that. Followers and other passive people expect to be motivated, so find a way to motivate them. If there is demand for your product that means you’re helping somebody solve a problem that’s important to them, so consider digging in and trying to develop empathy for them around that.

Plus, when you’re a proven success and rich you’ll be in a better place to make a difference. I’m not sure if you’ve ever worked in a social impact industry but I have and I can tell you that they bring many of their own frustrations and are very difficult to actually make an impact in and be profitable at the same time. Plus you’re almost always at the mercy of regulation that can change at any moment and sink your entire life’s work overnight. My wife works at an Ed tech company right now and it sounds brutal.

I like Google sheets for most things and Asana for to-do items. Daily standups to give quick updates and discuss blockers, weekly meetings to set goals and to discuss progress towards last week’s goals. Monthly reviews or team offsites to have longer, engage in more strategic discussions and set longer term goals.

Hire an operator or get a business partner.

Stanford MBA if you can get in. With that background you’ll be primed.

If you’re also growing at least 3x and the market size is big enough then you could probably raise a seed round at that revenue level.

But in general, try to find a way to use the funds hire people to do the repetitive things so you have more time to figure out how to turn that into $100k MRR

Here’s my take - if you need to “follow a passion” to be successful then you’ll probably fail. On the other hand, if you’re the type of person who is intrinsically motivated to show up every day with a consistent work ethic, then there is a decent chance that you’ll succeed. That is more of a habit discipline, and an internal motivation to do something meaningful vs. what is in my opinion a more selfish desire to be entertained.

Successful business people typically work extremely hard, are driven to put in the extra energy and effort to succeed and put some types of other people before themselves (customers, good employees, etc.).

I’ve built several businesses and once I’m immersed it’s never been difficult to get deeply interested in and every passionate about what I’m building, even in topics might have been boring for me to read about before I decided to work on it. There’s something about solving difficult problems that always manages keeps me engaged once I’ve decided to go all in on it.

If you have that and you happen to be super interested in what you’re doing that can be great too so long as you don’t forget that your business also exists to solve somebody else’s problems, not to fulfill your passions or interests.

Put the coaching on back burner until you get a job. Be successful enough to be admired by many people. Then coach people on how to do that.

It probably makes sense to leave if you can get a better position elsewhere.

If you want to stay, consider making a solid execution plan with the head of product and CTO, then present that to the CEO. The CEO may actually see that as your/their responsibility and appreciate it.

But if they still refuse to launch a product that generates revenue after you deliver a compelling and concrete plan then definitely leave.

Different type of AI; “advertising to idiots”

Depends on your other options and how successful the startup ends up being. You should also consider some other factors, like if you think you’d enjoy the position, if you’d learn a lot, and if you think you’d like workers with these founders.

I started at seed stage and there were some things that I still wished were more structured earlier.

If you are remote or growing quickly it’s even more important to get ahead of it.

Also, keep in mind that as you hire people, especially VPs, many will break the systems, so also don’t over invest. Some will put in their own systems and some will just be unorganized or anti-process. If you can afford to bring people on more slowly it will help.

IMO it’s even more important to have good systems in this more cost conscious environment. Poor organization is where your costs will quickly get out of control. Some VPs might try to hire people to do things that were previously automated either because they are lazy or because they think it’s prestigious to manage more people. You need to make sure your culture rewards efficiency instead of this type of selfish behavior. If you have pretty good systems overall before they join it will help. If a VP makes something substantially worse in a way that hits your metrics then you should consider moving on from them quickly.

Also note that this need doesn’t override having amazing product market for and tight messaging among sales and marketing. It should come a little bit after you’re also pretty happy with those other things and have a nice runway (ie you are growing at a solid rate).

One way to do this is just to carve out a few hours per week to work on this. Or, you can delegate to somebody to make sure all of the important processes are documented, or even make organization and documentation an element in the managers’ performance reviews. Some managers will hate this but if they don’t understand the importance and do their part then they probably won’t scale much past 30-40 people anyway IMO.