The Job of a CEO
What does it actually mean to lead when the "theater" of the corner office falls away?
The morning I had to tell 300 people they were losing their jobs, I learned what it really means to be a CEO. Standing in that concrete room in Gulshan, watching the light drain from faces I’d known for years, I understood with painful clarity that everything else about the role was just theater. The corner office, the strategy presentations, the board meetings - all of it was secondary to three brutal realities.
At Pathao, like most founders stumbling through the darkness of building something from nothing, I thought being CEO meant having the best ideas. I was wrong. A CEO has three jobs, and if you fail at any of them, nothing else matters.
Set the Vision and Never Stop Selling It
Your first job isn’t to have a vision. It’s to sell the vision, relentlessly, to everyone who will listen and many who won’t. You need your employees to believe in it enough to wake up every morning knowing why they’re here. You need investors to trust you with their capital. You need customers to believe you’re building something that matters.
When we started Pathao in 2015, nobody in Bangladesh had heard of venture capital. We weren’t building the next Uber - to most people, we were just glorified delivery boys. But the real challenge came when we tried to raise international capital. You don’t just pitch the company to foreign investors - you also have to pitch Bangladesh itself. Because no one had invested in Bangladesh before.
I’d walk into meetings in Singapore or Hong Kong and spend the first twenty minutes explaining why Bangladesh mattered. 170 million people. Fastest-growing economy in South Asia. Massive untapped mobile penetration. The investors knew nothing about our market, so before I could sell Pathao, I had to sell the country.
Steve Jobs didn’t just design computers at Apple. He redefined what Apple meant - the intersection of technology and creativity. He told that story until it became gospel. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos spent years convincing everyone that customer obsession would eventually lead to profits, even as the company bled money. But they were selling to audiences who understood their markets. We were selling dreams about a place most VCs couldn’t find on a map.
Keep the Company Funded
The second job is simpler to explain and brutal to execute: don’t run out of money. Money flows from two sources - sales or capital. Either customers pay you enough to keep the lights on, or investors believe in your future enough to fund today’s losses. Both require the CEO to be the chief fundraiser.
Every time I have seen a company hire a external fundraiser or even a CFO to fundraise, I have seen that fundraise go badly. As CEO of a startup, it has to be your job. No one else can do this for you. No one can pitch your idea better than you, and no investor will fund the company if they don’t like the CEO.
After Uber’s IPO in 2019, our major funding deal collapsed overnight. We went from having eighteen months of runway to three months. No investor would write a check until we cut costs drastically. That meant laying off hundreds of people in our Gulshan headquarters - the most painful decision I’d ever made. But it bought us time to survive.
The layoffs weren’t just about numbers on a spreadsheet. They were about keeping the company alive for those who remained. When you’re hemorrhaging cash, amputation isn’t failure - it’s surgery. Cut fast, cut clean, or watch the whole body die.
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky faced the same choice during COVID. When global travel evaporated, he cut 25% of the workforce but did it with such transparency and compassion that the company emerged stronger. He admitted the mistakes but framed the layoffs as necessary surgery to save the core. Contrast that with Better.com‘s CEO firing 900 people over Zoom - the backlash nearly killed the business.
Put the Right People in the Right Places
Your final job is people architecture. Hire the smartest, most motivated talent you can find, then place them where they can do the most damage to your competition. If you’ve communicated your vision properly and given them the resources they need, they should be able to execute better than you ever could alone.
At Pathao, our early success came from putting former consultants in operations roles, engineers in product positions, and hustlers in business development. But in Bangladesh, we faced a unique challenge - there was no ready-made talent pool for startups. We had to create it from scratch.
We hired university students and taught them venture capital. We found government employees frustrated with bureaucracy and showed them what agile execution looked like. We took people others would ignore and gave them equity in something that could change their lives. When you can’t pay Silicon Valley salaries, you pay with ownership and opportunity.
The challenge wasn’t finding perfect candidates - they didn’t exist. The challenge was spotting potential before anyone else could see it, then giving people room to grow faster than the market was changing.
The CEO job strips away all romanticism about leadership. You’re not the smartest person in the room - you’re the person who has to make sure the room doesn’t collapse. Vision, funding, people. Get those three right, and everything else becomes manageable. Get any of them wrong, and nothing else matters.
In Bangladesh, where we had to explain both the company and the country to every investor, where talent pools didn’t exist, where the ecosystem was being built in real time, these three responsibilities became even more critical. Success wasn’t just about executing better than competitors - it was about proving that world-class companies could be built from places the world had written off.