As the CEO, you need to keep your eye on the underlying product and business fundamentals of what you are doing. If you can not keep focused on the business side you must hire someone who will. Otherwise there is a reasonable chance your company will die. The two most common ways for a startup to die are founder conflicts and running out of cash. Running out of cash is often avoidable.
This is why I often advise people who want to play the startup lottery but have no business experience to try building a profitable bootstrapped business first. You learn a lot from running such a business that is just as essential when running a funded business.
Failing in an interesting way is hard. If you fail at the basics of running a business, you've not failed in an interesting way. If you fail because of some predictable startup issue like a founder conflict or building something nobody wants, you've not failed in an interesting way.
Failing in an interesting way means avoiding all those obvious traps and failing for some reason that is actually challenging and unforeseeable - for example, a smarter, more aggressive competitor stole your lunch, or if a political event simply made your product unsellable - those are interesting ways to fail.
If you read this far, you should follow me on twitter here.
