I recently exited a company and as part of the acquisition plan I also landed a job at the company. I am on IC track with an option/plan to switching to Director level if needed.<p>I was a technical founder and, as most founders do, I coded a lot in my startup life. I do miss that part but I am also looking at the next phase of my career now.<p>I am not sure how to transition from being a coder founder executive to Director or VP level executive.<p>Any other founder who went through something similar?
I am not a technical founder, more a product guy in between sales and engineering, but I was in a similar spot 4 years ago and about to leave, so here is my experience.<p>* we (~10 people) were acquired by/merged into Templafy (~80 people at the time, now over 350)<p>* first 1-2 years I kept me busy with learning everything in the new company, integrating everything and everyone into their new teams and growing our Berlin office.<p>* after that came the time to decide whether to take up formal responsibility in one of the departments, manage people etc. long story short I didn't, I loved the IC role, helped with tech prototypes and scouting, M&A<p>* after that I found two other projects that I found interesting and was in a unique position to help out with: one were internal tools for migrating customers from our monolith to micro-services system, then spend a couple of month with the data/analyst team.<p>* In the end I think the size of Templafy doesn't match my personal "ideal" organization size where I can be effective as a generalist, that's why I'm leaving.<p>>I am not sure how to transition from being a coder founder executive to Director or VP level executive.<p>I don't know much about you, but from my experience the overlap between "typical" founders and "typical" VP level executive is pretty small. So without knowing more I'd say you'll probably leave & start something new sooner or later :-)<p>That being said I still think you can have a great couple of years and contribute&benefit a lot, I just wouldn't worry too much if this turns out less permanent than you want it to be.<p>I'd probably rather approach it as "let's see where it takes me" not as "this is the starting point of me being an executive instead of a founder"