This is what it is like being pushed out of your own company - if only for a few days: David Richards

It was the chairman. “I’m downstairs,” he said. “Can you meet me now?” I threw on a shirt and jacket and went down. I was led through the lobby into a quiet back room, the kind hotels keep for conversations nobody else should hear. The choreography told me something was wrong. The lowered voices. The way staff made sure we were out of sight.

Even so, never in a million years did I imagine what came next. I had co-founded the business from a friend’s apartment. Along with two other co-founders, I had gone without salary not for months but for years. We had young families. We put our own savings in. We did not take venture capital.

Until the IPO, we funded the company ourselves. None of this is unusual. It is what founders do. It is what we quietly rely on people doing if we want innovation at all.

The company was now public. I was no longer the controlling shareholder. And in that moment, theory became reality.

He slid a document across the table. “Sign this.” I said, “No. You can’t do this.” He didn’t argue. He didn’t need to.

There is a fashionable phrase in parts of venture capital for moments like this. Founder transition. It sounds neat, rational, inevitable. Sometimes it is the right call. Often it is not. Increasingly, it is used to sanitise the removal of the person who created the thing in the first place.

Founders are not interchangeable. They carry the original insight. The emotional truth of why the company exists. They remember the near-death moments and the promises made before anyone was keeping minutes. They make decisions with incomplete information because they have lived inside the problem longer than anyone else.

That looks chaotic to a board. It looks risky on a spreadsheet. It looks uncomfortable to people who arrived late.

The academic framing is the Founder’s Dilemma. Rich or king. If you want control, you grow more slowly and keep the steering wheel. If you want scale, you take outside capital and trade autonomy for acceleration. The moment you stop controlling the board, you become fireable. Not in principle. In practice.

The breaking point usually comes when a company moves from invention to scale. Boards convince themselves the founder who got them from zero to one cannot take them from one to a hundred. They start talking about peacetime leadership. About governance. About professionalism. Sometimes they are right. Far more often, they confuse unpredictability with incompetence and polish with substance.

The irony is that when the time genuinely does come, the right founders usually step aside themselves. They self-select out. What destroys value is forcing that moment early, mistaking discomfort for dysfunction.

Less than a week after that meeting in Belgravia, I was reinstated. When boards forget what founders are and why they matter, they do not just fire a chief executive. They fire the reason the company existed at all.

David Richards is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs