Hitting your milestones is what gets founders fired
Research on startup CEOs found the more successfully you build the company, the more likely investors decide you shouldn't run it.
The assumption behind most startup advice is that if you execute well, you get to keep your job. Research by Harvard Business School's Noam Wasserman on startup leadership turns that assumption backward. Looking at founder-CEO successions, he found that founders who hit real milestones — shipping the product, closing a serious round of outside funding — were more likely to be pushed out of the CEO seat than founders who were struggling.
The mechanism isn't ingratitude. It's mismatch. A company that just closed a big product milestone or a big funding round is, almost by definition, a different company than it was six months earlier — bigger scope, more moving parts, new kinds of problems. The skills that got the founder through the scrappy early version of the job are not automatically the skills the expanded job now needs, and investors who supplied the capital that funded the growth are the ones positioned to notice the gap first and act on it.
Wasserman's broader work names this the founder's dilemma: you can generally hold on to control of your company, or you can maximize its value, but the paths that maximize value tend to require outside capital, and outside capital tends to come with a board that reserves the right to replace you. Founders who prioritize staying rich (equity) have to be willing to not stay king (control).
Success doesn't insulate you from being replaced. In the data, it's often the trigger.