I’m a 3x entrepreneur. I was the CTO of my first company, which failed. I was the CEO of my second one, which was acquired when it was still very tiny.

Wattpad was my third and last company, but it was my first one as a scale-up CEO. It was a very different beast. The learning curve for me was extremely steep.

Thankfully, I was very privileged to have many world-class VCs and their firms invested in Wattpad. Being surrounded by world-class investors and their network not only helped me surmount that learning curve but also helped TSFV become a much better VC firm. More on that in a different post.

One of these firms is Union Square Ventures. The first and most important thing I learned from USV’s Fred Wilson is, “What does a CEO do?”

A CEO does only three things:

• Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders.
• Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company.
• Ensures there is always enough cash in the bank.

A CEO should delegate all other tasks to his or her team.

In my experience, it’s rare to find great CEOs and consequently, great companies, not getting these three things right. Conversely, dysfunctional companies usually get at least one of these three things really wrong.

I frequently talked about these three things with my team at Wattpad. My leadership team and all the employees knew what to expect and could hold me accountable. And they did.

So much is packed into these three things. They are deceptively simple, and yet they are extremely nuanced. There’s enough material here for a book! So, expect multiple blog posts in the future on this topic.

However, this post alone is already a great guiding post for any CEO whose company has achieved (or is beyond) product-market fit, or the team is ready to scale, say, roughly 10 people, and even for companies of much larger size.

This post is the foundation of CEOs’ leadership, and everything flows from here. I learned it, I lived it, and I can testify that this is the first thing that any CEO must get right and keep getting right throughout their tenure.

And that’s precisely why this is the inaugural post in the Two Small Fish Ventures Masterclass Series.

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