8 Founders Who Were Fired From Their Companies & Why?
Why Founders Are Fired From Their Own Company?
When you start a company, You always think to make it big. You have your dreams, hopes, and aspiration attached to it.
But if an external investor or venture capital is involved with your company, your vision might collapse.
The founders, who started the company might get fired.
According to Havard Business Review’s Research,
- Most founders surrender their management control in the first 3 years.
- A very small percentage of founders led their company’s IPO.
- 4 out of 5 entrepreneurs are forced to step down from the CEO’s post.
In this article, we gonna discuss 8 founders who were fired from their own companies and why?
So, without any further delay, Let’s Start.
1.Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs founded Apple along with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976
In the year 1983, Steve Jobs hired John Sculley as the CEO of Apple. Sculley was earlier the CEO of the famous soft drink Pepsi Cola.
In early 1985, Macintosh Computer was launched. It had high expectations from the market but the results were very disappointing. After the failure of Macintosh Computer, the relation between Steve and Sculley began to sore and they have a different vision regarding Apple.
As a result, John Sculley with the support of Arthur Rock decided to reorganize Apple. This reorganization suggested removing Steve Jobs from the Macintosh group and put him into the New Product Development group. Hence, Making Steve powerless within the organization.
To counter this situation, Steve Jobs developed a plan to get rid of John Sculley and take over Apple from him. However, this plan was leaked and hence failed. After that Steve Jobs said that he will leave Apple but the board members denied. According to the board members, he should reconsider his decision.
Finally, on 17th September 1985, Steve Jobs submitted his resignation letter to the Apple board and left.
2.Elon Musk
Elon Musk founded the company named as X.com in 1999 with a capital investment of $10 Million. It provided online financial services and email payment facilities.
In the year 2000, X.com merged with his competitor Confinity and Elon became the CEO. The company was renamed as Paypal, which used to be a service provided by Confinity in 2001.
In October 2000, Elon was removed from the CEO due to disagreements with other company executives over his desire to move PayPal’s Unix-based infrastructure to a Microsoft one.
Although after his removal from the CEO, he remained on the board.
3.Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey founded Twitter along with three other members in 2006.
In the initial years when Twitter took off, Jack Dorsey was in the charge of the company. According to Hatching Twitter book,
- Jack was portrayed as a bad manager.
- He took credit for everything.
- He used to handle criticism very poorly.
Also during the initial phase, rather than focusing on the company, he pursued his hobbies such as sewing, drawing classes, frequent partying, etc.
He also lacked proper communication with the investors and didn’t have a backup for Twitter’s database.
All the above activities annoyed the board members and his co-founders.
This resulted in the firing of Jack Dorsey by the management in 2008 and they rather offered him a passive chairman role and a silent board seat.
The above are only three names on the list. There are more five founders who were fired from their own company.
P.S. Founders of Uber, Tesla, and Three other Billion dollar companies are on the list.
Kindly visit my Blog to know more about them and why they were fired?
