Our co-founder and long-tenured Chief Technology Officer has incredible core values and wants to lead our new AI-driven product division, but we suspect he lacks the cognitive and technical capacity to direct this level of complexity. How do we run a brutal GWC™ evaluation on a co-founder without destroying our personal relationship or partnership?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Evaluating a co founder is the ultimate test of an owner's commitment to the health of the business. When legacy partners want to lead new, highly technical divisions, they often confuse their history of hard work with current capacity. You must separate the person from the seat and use the GWC™ tool with absolute objectivity.

GWC™ stands for Get it, Want it, and Capacity to do it. Your co founder clearly wants the seat, but you must look closely at the Get it and Capacity dimensions. Get it means their brain is naturally wired for the day to day reality of the role. Capacity means they possess the actual skills, knowledge, and mental bandwidth required to execute. AI driven operations and complex architecture require deep, current technical expertise that a legacy executive might not have.

To execute this evaluation without destroying your partnership, schedule a private session outside your standard Level 10 Meeting™. Frame the conversation around the future state of the Accountability Chart and what is best for the business as you prepare for an exit. Ask your co founder to define the five major roles of this new seat, then assess whether they have the specialized skills to run them.

Be honest. If they do not have a three out of three yes on GWC™, they cannot sit in that seat. A partial yes is a no. If they lack the capacity, explain that forcing them into a seat where they will struggle will destroy their legacy and tank the company's valuation. Work together to find a seat they actually GWC™, perhaps a strategic advisory or research seat, and recruit an external expert to run the AI division.