Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Mark Seeger’s approach to personal scaling as subtraction rather than accumulation. When a company outgrows the capabilities that launched it, Mark Seeger, founder and co-CEO of Glydways and previously a product design engineer at Apple, a worldwide digital innovation lab director across a seven-year tenure at Ogilvy, and the founder of two companies he later sold, holds that the skills that earned a founder the job are not the skills that will scale the enterprise, and that eleven years of building Glydways required him to release most of what two engineering degrees and an MBA had taught him. Glenn Gow places that shift in context: across a five-year period in venture-backed companies, CEOs are replaced roughly 60 percent of the time, not because they were the wrong choice at the start, but because they were unable to acquire the new set of skills and the new identity the company needed as it grew.
This episode is for founders and CEOs who are still the best technical operator in their own company and are starting to suspect that being the best technical operator is now the constraint.
Key Takeaways
- Founder scaling is a subtraction problem, not an addition problem. Mark Seeger, founder and co-CEO of Glydways, describes eleven years of doing fewer and fewer things while doing those few things far better, and names identity change as the advice he would give any founder.
- Some capabilities survive the transition and most do not. Mark Seeger identifies selling, communicating, convincing, and inspiring as the through lines that carried forward from his earlier career, and treats the technical expertise underneath them as material to release.
- The goal of the organization design is founder removability. Mark Seeger measures progress by whether Glydways will behave, grow, and improve in his absence, and states plainly that his own continued involvement was previously inhibiting its performance.
- Emotional ownership of the mission produces different behavior than compensation does. Mark Seeger separates ownership from equity: salary, shares, vesting, and bonus structure purchase effort, while a team that cares about the end state behaves differently, and the scale of the Glydways mission filters the hiring pool down to people who want that problem.
- Learning an unfamiliar operating model carries a measurable schedule cost. Mark Seeger estimates Glydways is two to three years behind where it should be because of the cascading mistakes involved in learning a partnership and ownership model that the Silicon Valley ecosystem around him did not teach.
Founders Subtract the Skills That Earned Them the Job as the Company Scales
Mark Seeger, founder and co-CEO of Glydways, begins the diagnosis where most founders resist it. Every entrepreneur who starts a company has effectively hired themselves, with investors and customers validating that decision for some period of time. That validation is real, and it is also temporary: “The skills that got me the job are absolutely not the skills that will allow this enterprise, I think, to scale.”
Mark Seeger distinguishes between traits and skills, and only the traits survive. He names the through lines as selling, communicating, convincing, and inspiring, which matter to leadership and to the partnerships Glydways depends on. Everything else went. Over eleven years of building Glydways, an urban mobility company whose stated ambition is rewiring urban mobility for half the human population, he shed the technical capabilities he had spent decades acquiring through a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA from RPI.
The replacement behavior is narrower rather than broader. Mark Seeger describes his own trajectory as “doing less and less and less. But the few things I did do them much better.” That is the operating rule for a founder whose company is outgrowing them: the answer to expanding scope is not a longer list of responsibilities executed adequately, but a shorter list executed at a standard nobody else in the company will match.
His advice to executives facing that transition is stated as a warning about self-concept rather than about workload: “be prepared to change your identity.” A founder who treats the change as skill acquisition alone will keep the old identity intact and quietly keep doing the old work. Mark Seeger is explicit that the subtraction is the harder half.
Founders Build Organizations That Improve in the Founder’s Absence
Mark Seeger, founder and co-CEO of Glydways, traces the goal back to what drew him out of pure engineering in the first place. His interest was never the product itself. It was the corporate infrastructure that pays for a product, sustains its evolution, and outputs better products over time, which he began studying at Apple more than twenty-five years ago and continued at Ogilvy, where brand strategy was the part he could see the value of but could not yet explain.
Applied to his own company, that produces a specific design target. Mark Seeger describes wanting to build “a … recursive self-learning machine that itself can get better, itself can relearn, and that I can remove myself from without affecting its performance.” The machine in that sentence is people and organizations, not equipment.
The honest version of the test is what makes it useful. Mark Seeger does not claim his removal would leave performance flat. He states that his continued presence is probably inhibiting performance, and that it demonstrably did in the past. A founder applying this rule asks a harder question than whether the company will survive their absence. The question is whether any given piece of work runs better once the founder is no longer in the path of it, and the answer determines what goes on the subtraction list from the previous section.
Founders Transfer Emotional Ownership of the Idea Instead of Buying Effort With Equity
Mark Seeger, founder and co-CEO of Glydways, made a deliberate choice at the company’s founding in early 2016 that runs against the founder-as-inventor model. He did not want to own the idea emotionally or as a matter of ego and identity. The distinction he draws is between two pitches: telling a recruit or an investor that he invented something and wants them to work on it, versus telling them he is bringing forward something the world needs that will also be profitable, and asking them to look at it.
The purpose of that framing is transfer. Mark Seeger’s aim was to give employees, business partners, and the executive team psychological and emotional ownership of the idea rather than a working relationship in which he pays people to execute his vision.
Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, pressed the point that Mark Seeger uses the word ownership without using the word equity, and Mark Seeger confirmed the separation directly. Compensation, including literal shares, is the stable baseline and part of the arrangement. Ownership in his sense means an employee cares about the end state and what that end state does for other people. His description of the alternative is a list: “here’s your salary, here’s your equity, here’s your vesting, here’s your bonus structure.” A team assembled that way behaves differently from a team connected to a mission it believes in.
Two named results followed. The scale of the Glydways problem functions as a hiring filter, screening out people who do not want a problem that size and leaving a talent pool Mark Seeger credits with the company’s survival. The cost side is equally specific: he estimates Glydways is two to three years behind where it should be, because the partnership model and the ownership-based hiring model were not taught by the Silicon Valley ecosystem he was operating in, and he learned them through cascading mistakes.
Leaders Define Their Own Job Before Adding AI Tools to It
Mark Seeger, founder and co-CEO of Glydways, treats AI the way he treated every prior tool that changed knowledge work. He came up without a word processor, doing everything by hand, then moved through word processing and speech-to-text, and reads AI as the next step in that sequence: a human productivity enhancer and a way of removing clutter.
His position on where it belongs organizationally is unambiguous. AI is not an IT function, a technology function, or a matter for the CTO alone. It sits at the executive level. At Glydways, AI already runs through the product stack, including the vehicle routing protocol and the autonomous vehicles themselves, and the company has invested for years in AI tools sandboxed inside the Glydways ecosystem so that its databases and internal tools do not leak outward.
The part that connects back to founder scaling is the prerequisite he attaches to tool adoption. Before asking what a tool will improve, Mark Seeger asks what his job is right now, and expects the answer to differ tomorrow, next week, and next year. The sequence matters: “if you have clarity, it forces clarity on what your job is, why are you here?” A leader who starts from the tool will find places it helps that are not core to what they contribute. A leader who starts from the current job description will apply the tool to the destination that actually matters, and will notice sooner when the job has changed again.
Principles Founders Will Apply From This Episode
| Principle | Practice | Named outcome evidence |
| Scaling yourself means subtracting, not adding | Release the technical work that earned the founder the job, keep the through lines of selling and communicating, and execute a shorter list at a higher standard | Across eleven years building Glydways, Mark Seeger released the technical capability behind a mechanical engineering master’s and an RPI MBA, and Glydways moved from a single-employee idea to a company producing vehicles through Suzuki, one of its larger investors and a board participant |
| Design the organization for the founder’s removal | Judge structural decisions by whether the company will grow and improve with the founder out of the path, not by whether it will survive | Mark Seeger states his own involvement was previously inhibiting Glydways performance, which is the standard that drove him from CEO through Chief Strategy Officer to co-CEO across the company’s phases |
| Ownership of the mission outperforms compensation | Give employees emotional ownership of the end state rather than paying them to execute the founder’s vision, with equity treated as baseline rather than as the motivator | The scale of the Glydways mission filtered the hiring pool to talent Mark Seeger credits with the company’s survival, recruited on the end state rather than on salary, equity, vesting, and bonus structure |
| Learning an unfamiliar model carries a schedule cost worth naming | Assume an operating model the surrounding ecosystem does not teach will be learned through mistakes, and price that into the plan rather than discovering it late | Mark Seeger estimates Glydways is two to three years behind where it should be, a cost he attributes to learning the partnership and ownership models without local precedent |
| Clarity about the job precedes clarity about the tools | Answer what the job is this quarter before deciding where AI applies, and re-answer it as the role changes | Glydways invested years ago in AI tools sandboxed inside its own ecosystem, with AI running the vehicle routing protocol and the autonomous vehicles, and Mark Seeger places AI ownership at the executive level rather than under the CTO alone |
Quotes from This Episode
- “It was less about the product. It was more about the machine that builds the product.” Mark Seeger, Founder and Co-CEO, Glydways
- “Over the last eleven years, I’ve had to shed and let go all these things I just spent decades learning and getting diplomas for, undergrad and grad … All of that I had to shed.” Mark Seeger, Founder and Co-CEO, Glydways
- “Apple designs stuff, they don’t build stuff, contract manufacturers do that.” Mark Seeger, Founder and Co-CEO, Glydways
- “The magnitude of what we are doing, it’s huge, kind of filters out the people who want to work on that.” Mark Seeger, Founder and Co-CEO, Glydways
- “AI to me, just like those tools, can and should and so far is a human productivity enhancer.” Mark Seeger, Founder and Co-CEO, Glydways
Frequently Asked Questions
What skills does a founder have to give up as the company scales?
Mark Seeger, founder and co-CEO of Glydways, told Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and a CEO for 25 years, that the skills which earned him the job are not the skills that will allow the enterprise to scale. Over eleven years he released the technical capability behind a master’s in mechanical engineering and an MBA from RPI, keeping only the through lines of selling, communicating, convincing, and inspiring. His summary of the trajectory is doing less and less while doing the few remaining things much better, and his advice to executives facing the same transition is to be prepared to change their identity rather than simply add skills.
How does a founder know whether the company is ready to run without them?
Mark Seeger, founder and co-CEO of Glydways, judges the organization by whether it will behave, grow, and improve in his absence rather than by whether it will merely survive. He describes the target as a recursive self-learning machine made of people and organizations that gets better and relearns on its own, and states that his own continued involvement is probably inhibiting performance and demonstrably did so in the past. That standard is what moved him through CEO, Chief Strategy Officer, and now co-CEO across the company’s phases.
Is equity enough to make employees act like owners?
Mark Seeger, founder and co-CEO of Glydways, separates ownership from equity and treats compensation as the baseline rather than the motivator. Salary, shares, vesting, and bonus structure purchase execution, while employees who care about the end state and what it does for other people behave differently. At Glydways, the scale of the mission filters the hiring pool to people who want that problem, and Mark Seeger credits the resulting talent with the company’s survival.
Founders Work With Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Their Own Capability
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits, drawing on 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
