Every founder thinks they want to be CEO. Not many want to do the grind.

Is there any startup founder here who doesn’t want to be CEO? Raise your hand. Shout out. No? Nobody? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Everyone wants to be the CEO. The CEO is the boss. The CEO gets to make the important decisions. When the startup hits the big time, it’s the CEO who gets interviewed on CNBC and invited to the White House, not the CTO who invented the technology. No matter how many co-founders you have, to the outside world, it’s the CEO’s company.

So I get it. If you’re ambitious, you have to be at apex of the pyramid, and if you’re not, why would you ever leave your cushy corporate job to build a startup?

But here’s the problem, bros and brodettes — CEO is more than a title. It’s a role. The title is glamorous. The job? A painful grind. The kind of grind that many founders don’t really want to do.

As CEO of an early-stage startup, you have not 1 but 3 full-time jobs:

Full-time Job #1: Sales

As CEO, your primary job is selling the product. Even if you don’t have a product yet. The CEO needs to be spending every waking hour of every day talking to potential customers.

Cold calls, emails, LinkedIn outreach, trade shows, conferences, customer site visits are your daily routine. Distributors, resellers, industry influencers all need to be on speed dial.

Many founders hate doing sales. It’s frustrating. It’s humiliating. It takes a certain kind of personality to enjoy selling a product that nobody knows they need yet and to do it well.

So most startup CEOs plan to hire a head of sales or CRO or someone, anyone, to do the sales for them as soon as they have funding. Sorry, that never, ever works. The biggest mistake startup CEOs make is to hand off sales to someone else.

Until you’re past $2M in revenue, sales isn’t about selling products. It’s about understanding the customer and finding that elusive product-market fit. It’s about adjusting the product to fit customer needs, it’s about adjusting the marketing to find messaging that resonates, it’s about adjusting the business model to find a sales process that fits customers’ purchasing processes.

No hired gun can do that for you until the product has reached market acceptance. Until then, the CEO needs to be making every sales call personally.

Full-time Job #2: Fundraising

You need money. And tens of thousands of VC firms, angel groups, family offices, and individual investors are offering to fund startups just like yours.

So you write a pitch deck and expect that in a couple of months, you’ll have millions of dollars in the bank. If your name happens to be Sam Altman or you were the CTO of OpenAI, you can raise billions in a day. For every other CEO, fundraising is an excruciating full-time job. If you think sales is no fun, fundraising is 10x worse.

Think fundraising is a 2-month diversion before you can get back to working on the product? It’s not. Not even close. Raising a round takes a minimum of 6 months, 9 months more typically. And that’s after you’ve spent months laying the groundwork.

Pitching to investors and working through the diligence process is a full-time job that takes up a CEO’s every waking hour. And after 9 months when you’ve successfully closed your pre-seed round, you get a weekend to take a break before you have to start laying the groundwork for the seed round.

Full-time Job #3: Running the Business

Big companies run themselves while the CEO thinks up grand strategies. Big companies have whole departments dedicated to the minutiae of daily operations. A startup? It’s all on the CEO’s shoulders.

Accounting. Government permits. Tax filings. Business licenses. Board meetings. Legal. Insurance. Patents. HR. Recruiting. Paying the bills. Invoicing customers. Finding office space. Shipping. Supplies. Distribution. Marketing. Trade shows and conferences. Marketing strategy. PR. Social media posts. Customer support. Investor relations. And someone needs to make the coffee.

Sure, you’ll have accountants, lawyers, and an office manager to help out, maybe even a COO or CMO to handle the details. But they can only do what the CEO decides. Each one is not a lot of work, but add them up and it’s a full-time job running the business. The job of the CEO. And that doesn’t even include the weekly emergencies that will keep you from getting anything else done for days.

When Do I Sleep?

Three full-time jobs add up to 30 hours of work per day. Something has to give.

The first thing to go is sleep. Then exercise. Next is friends, then family. Startup CEO is not a job where it’s possible to prioritize work-life balance.

That said, you have to find a way to stay healthy, both physically and mentally. Make sure to take breaks. Burnout is as big a cause of startup failure as co-founder splits (and the two go hand-in-hand.)

Are We Having Fun Yet?

If you’re a developer, a scientist, a professor and you enjoy working in the lab, developing new technology, or building products, sorry, you won’t be doing any of those things for the next 10 years. Those are the jobs of the CTO or VP of Engineering. The job of the CEO is to build the company, not the product, and you absolutely do not have time for both.

On the other hand, if you enjoy sales, enjoy working with customers, enjoy the challenge of parting reluctant investors with their cash, enjoy creating spreadsheets of revenues and costs, and most of all, enjoy wearing a dozen different hats every day, then the CEO role is perfect for you.

Is There a Better Way?

Don’t like the narrative? Want work-life balance? There are alternatives to the startup rat race.

First, don’t take venture capital. Venture capital requires high-speed cycles: grow a business to $100M in revenue in 5-7 years or die trying. It’s a nearly impossible task, and the clock is constantly ticking.

Venture capital is tied to fast cycles. Seven to ten years is a long time to wait for a return. And the longer it takes to get to exit, the lower the IRR for investors. A 2x return in 1 year is better than a 10x return in 10. Speed counts.

Taking venture capital (including angel investors) means growing revenue quickly, using the traction to raise more funding to put into growing the company even faster, using that success to raise yet more funding to explode towards that $100M goal.

Venture capital is not the best funding source for every business opportunity or every founding team.

Eliminate venture capital and you’ve not only eliminated one of the three jobs of the CEO, but you’re no longer committed to growing at exponential rates.

If you bootstrap the business instead, you can grow at your own pace. You can prioritize family time and vacations based on your needs and customer needs rather than funding cycles.

Second, if you need venture capital to build the business but would rather work on product development than sales and fundraising, you don’t have to be the CEO. Find a co-founder to take on that role while you focus on the product, or research, or whatever else brings you satisfaction.

It’s Just a Job

We all think we want to be CEOs. We all think we want to be the big cheese, the grand poobah, the head honcho.

But take a step back and think about what the job actually entails: sales, fundraising, and operations. Is that what you enjoy doing? If so, great.

If not, ditch the idea that the CEO is the fearless leader who deserves all the glory. Startup CEO is just a job. CTO, CMO, VP of Operations might be a role you’d enjoy more.