Kill Your Darlings

Rick Boone, Antler VC, Member

2026-06-23

7 min read 

I excitedly volunteered to give this lightning talk on “Thinking Like A CEO” because working with dozens of founders a week, many of them technical, gives me a deep familiarity with the struggles - and successes - of technical leaders being asked to “Think - and perform - like a CEO”. Coincidentally, after volunteering, I came across an article in Bloomberg which reported that Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has only a single person reporting to him, which is his chief of staff. The leader of what is increasingly one of the world’s (and humanity’s) most important companies set his organizational structure so that he could focus on what he thinks are the two most important things at his company - strategy and culture. In his own words, on strategy, he said “In many ways it’s a zoom-in versus zoom-out thing. It’s very hard to pay attention to the strategic picture if there’s, like, a zillion things you have to handle tomorrow “. And on culture - “I spend probably half of my time talking to staff about the culture of Anthropic and how the culture works. Maintaining the company culture is probably my number one top priority”. Before becoming CEO and clearing his entire schedule and org chart solely to focus on strategy and culture, Dario was a neuroscientist, biophysicist, software engineer, scientist and AI researcher. In other words, he was a technical expert and leader.

As I was reading this, I realized it was a perfect example to use in discussing this topic. Not because of Dario’s selection of strategy and culture as the topics to spend his brain cycles on (though, as an aside, those are the same two I’d focus on if given the chance), but because of the way he did it. Despite spending his entire life beforehand focus on technical discovery, when it came time to think like a CEO and shepherd his unique company through what can only be described as unique times, he completely changed how he operated, how he thought, where he spent his brain cycles. He delegated and gave over responsibility for almost all of the company’s day-to-day work to others and focused on what he could do to create the best outcome for his company. He had to leave technical work behind. His life’s focus, the thing that got him here, would not get him there. He had to kill his darlings.

So what does it mean to think like a CEO? First, it’s best to think of what a CEO does - and while multifaceted, their job distills down into 3 fundamental things: Generate and manage funding for the company, define/communicate/ensure the vision/mission/strategy of the company, and align all interests and stakeholders of the company. To do these things, successful CEO thinking tends to include:

Note that I do not want to be prescriptive about the particulars of what a CEO should focus on, as that changes, depending on a multitudes of factors (Dario chose to focus on strategy and culture because of what Anthropic needs right now). What I do want to discuss though, is the nature of the thinking itself.

A key element of CEO thinking and reality is the fact that you must be engaged with ALL domains and area of a company and its business. Sales, marketing, finance, fundraising, legal, operations, culture, strategy, eng, product, HR, etc. Something is always on fire and you simply get to choose daily, weekly, monthly, which fire in which domain you are going to put out for that period of time - regardless, and this is the critical part, of whether you have any experience in that domain or not. Every week, Elon Musk goes to each of his companies and solves their hardest problem - by the end of 1 year he’s solved each of his companies 52 hardest problems. You are responsible for the outcome of the company. Every type of problem is now your problem, every domain is now your domain and you need to either an expert, competent, engaged or at the very least conversant with that domain.

So why does this tend to be a challenge for technical leaders? In short, because it requires us to, as Dario did, kill our darlings. The things which got us here - sharp technical minds, the ability to bring overwhelming focus and inexhaustible reasoning to a single problem and deliver an elegant solution, the simplicity of a deterministic, objectively effective technical solution (requirements, inputs, outputs, measurements), being a master in 1 or a few related domains and having an outsized depth of expertise in those domains - will not get us there.

Engineering, once your central organizing and contextualizing viewpoint, becomes just one piece of a very large and diverse puzzle. And sometimes, not even the most important piece (especially now with software becoming free and infinite). We must gain objectivity, impartiality,and balance when it comes to weighing engineering against other flavors of problems or sources of value. You must realize - often very brutally and painfully - that you and your engineers do not know best. The customer and the market does.

You go from master of one trade to jack of all. You must embrace the areas which engineers (or, in general, those left-brained amongst us), typically do not have intuition in, patience for, or more than we’d like to admit, awareness of. (It wasn’t till I got into VC 2 years ago that I realized marketing was an actual real thing. With real people doing it! With real results!). And you must be good at them all - either by your own skills or by being very skilled at team selection and delegation. Which still requires understanding and competence within the domain, so as to know if you’re choosing other experts well.

Relatedly, thinking like a CEO requires extension past what tend to be natural competencies and comfort zones for technical leaders. Being a generalist instead of a specialist, relying on intuition instead of empiricism, being strategic instead of tactical.

The benefits of doing all of this though, are massive, for those who choose to do so. One becomes able to scale themselves across multiple problem areas, widening their impact and distribution of their ideas + actions. Multidisciplinary thinking often leads to novel and unique solutions, as the mind exposed to multiple domains applies learnings from one area to another. The more a person becomes comfortable with the discomfort of not being a master in one area, and allows themselves to instead, continuously learn and grow into new areas, the more that person makes mistakes and fails - which is the most important input to long-term success. Leaders with clear + effective visions, missions, strategies and cultures tend to have better performing organizations and outcomes.

So, think like a CEO. Kill your darlings. Remember that what got you here will not get you there. And turn your technical mastery into thinking mastery, and expand it across all potential problem surfaces.

Rick Boone is a Venture Partner at Antler VC in Austin, Texas