Coming in as the second-time CEO

Founding a company and being handed one are different jobs. I've done both — started companies from nothing, and stepped in as a later-stage CEO to help existing ones scale. Taking a chair someone else built is its own discipline, and it's easy to get wrong in exactly the first ninety days, when everyone is watching to see who you are.

The instinct, when you inherit a company, is to prove your value by changing things. It's almost always the wrong instinct.

You inherit the history whether you like it or not

The company exists because of hundreds of decisions made before you arrived — some brilliant, some expedient, all made with less hindsight than you now enjoy. Sweeping in with a verdict on all of it is the fastest way to lose the room. Earn the right to change things by first showing you understand why they are the way they are.

You inherit a company's history whether you like it or not. Respect it, then change what must change.

The first ninety days

1. Listen before you lead. Spend your early credibility buying information, not spending opinions. Talk to the team, the customers, the board, the people who left. The company will tell you what's wrong if you let it.
2. Find the two or three things that matter. Every company you step into has a short list of decisions that will define your tenure. Resist the urge to fix everything; find those, and go.
3. Keep what's working, and be clear about what isn't. Change for its own sake reads as insecurity. Precise, well-explained change reads as leadership. Say what you're keeping as loudly as what you're changing.
4. Win the team you inherited before you hire the team you want. You'll be tempted to bring in your own people fast. Move too quickly and you signal that loyalty, not merit, is now the currency. Give the team you have a real chance to rise first.

When the founder is still in the building

Often the hardest and most important relationship is with the founder who stepped back. Handled well, they're your single greatest ally — the keeper of the mission and the institutional memory. Handled poorly, the transition curdles, and the whole company feels it. Approach that relationship with respect, patience, and a clear, shared understanding of who owns what.

[Mark — a line here on one of your own step-in experiences would anchor the whole piece. What surprised you most about taking a company you didn't start?]

The step-in CEO who succeeds isn't the one with the boldest hundred-day plan. It's the one who earns the room first, and then spends that hard-won trust on the handful of changes that actually matter.