This may be the wrong venue (e.g. site for startups), but there is a reason the big companies have people that specialize in each of the areas he claims a founder/developer has an advantage in.<p>While early in the business you benefit mostly in saving money by doing it all yourself, eventually you will want to hire people do these things for you.<p>A ceo's job is not to be in the trenches answering tech support calls- while that sounds nice on paper, his job, especially when you hit some serious growth is to be looking 5/10 years down the line.<p>I work at a ~6mil/year revenue company that is <10 years old. I've been here for 3 of those years. In that time, the biggest hurdle I've observed is precisely that- watching the technical CEO relinquish some of his control in order to focus more on growth strategy and quality of the product.
I do share the observation of technical leaders with a quick observation very well and it has 2 sides of the coin.
It can be crucial in the early stage for a company to survive. Some people see it as control, but on the other side it often carries a certain degree of success.
The flip side is that kind of close relation of the founder/CEO to customer and not letting go the control can limit growth of a company. And if the company keeps increasing on revenue/employees and the situation has not much improved it sometimes turns to chaos within the organization.
There's a common perception that answering support inquires is a waste of time. I agree - it's a problem if you're spending a lot of time debugging issues that aren't incorporated back into the product. It's not an issue if it's good feedback that helps build a better product for everyone else. Most of our support inquires are the latter.
Hmmm---when you adopt this model you have to be careful you aren't running a consulting business if you think you're a startup (e.g. you'll be underpricing yourself.