If you’re not a founder and you’re putting this kind of energy into your job, I hope you at least have substantial equity, because otherwise you’re being taken advantage of. Know your worth!
Also if you think this is you, it probably isn’t. There isn’t an “engineering” wildcard or a “marketing” wildcard, the whole point is that these people do everything.
Schipplock has a good imagination, realistic, too:
>As someone already commented, it‘s a recipe for a burn-out.
But doesn't burn out the real wildcard CEO material. For this person it's not wild to go beyond a recipe, it's common.
A lower-performing CEO who's only involved in less than everything a company does, limits the company to achieveing less than everything it could. These are the ones most threatened by a wildcard operator at any level, and that trepidation will trickle down until making contact with the threat in a neutralizing way. Poisoning the chain of command against comprehensive problem-solving all the way down.
But one thing that I think a lot of what the article missed, and perhaps what demarcates the good from the just okay wildcards, is that the one of the overall goals for any task is to find a good specialist/maintainer who will continue on and refine the min-viable into something sustainable long term. Those who care not to firefight, but to do the work of tending the garden while they go on to fight the next fire.
I haven’t met many people like them either. I have also not met many ruthless corporate mercenaries. This particular person might be an edge case (they also retired at age 40…while living a pretty upscale lifestyle).
So it’s possible to be a wildcard and be wildly successful, contrary to the statements here. Just a helluva lot harder.
Are they being taken advantage of? Sure, most people are being taken advantage of, that's the system we live in, it's called capitalism. But in rich countries that often still leaves enough to have a good life.
This is exactly half of what’s required in a startup.
The other half is someone in operations who can do the organization of chaos output into a coherent system.