Published on the 23/02/2016 | Written by Clare Coulson
Vaughn Rowsell has a reputation for being the moustachioed maverick of the New Zealand tech industry and last week he did not disappoint, stepping down as CEO of his company Vend…
He issued a spirited call for the next CEO of Vend in a post bubbling with enthusiasm, published on his 8degrees blog. He declared: “I’ve always admired people who know when their hat has grown and they acknowledge they no longer fit it.”
He went on to say that he had come to the realisation that he couldn’t juggle the roles of founder, CEO and product visionary-cum-evangelist successfully any longer.
“I realised my tour with the CEO hat is done and I want to focus on the vision of the product. Both are f***ing huge hats. But being CEO of a 200 odd person company growing fast has kept me away from the product vision, which is honestly what I love and why I started Vend,” he wrote. It’s taken him the Christmas holidays to work out the logistics of it, but now he is excited to be focusing on the area which made Vend a success in the first place: the product.
Speaking to iStart on day one of the new one-hatted regime, Rowsell said he that, to be perfectly honest, it was a “huge relief” to be able to hand over the CEO hat to someone else, adding that he has no desire to keep control. He was already feeling liberated and had begun to make notes on future products for Vend on a clean page of a brand new notebook (Vend branded with inspirational quotes, pop out moustache and instructions of how to build a paper aeroplane, of course).
Alex Fala, who was until last week Vend’s head of strategy and finance, is now holding the fort as Acting CEO. When asked why he didn’t simply make Fala CEO outright, Rowsell said that Vend has a culture of choosing the absolute best person for the job. That could be Alex, he says, and Fala already has a number of ideas that he would like to put into action. But Vend still has a lot of growing to do in the coming years and Rowsell is keen to find someone with not only the right cultural fit but who also has some “been-there-done-that experience” as he puts it.
“Someone who is a couple of chapters ahead in the ‘how to scale a high growth start-up book”.
Asked to describe the ideal candidate in five words he replied with little hesitation: “Detailed, experienced, commercial, level-headed and ambitious.”
It might take three months, it might take three years, but as long as Fala is in the CEO seat, Rowsell is not in any hurry to make a rash appointment. It’s a scary prospect, hiring someone to be your own boss, and he admits that getting it wrong could be “disastrous”. Asked if he is usually fearless when it comes to business, he replied that he feels fear all the time, but he doesn’t let it get in the way.
“I don’t think anybody is really fearless. Fear is okay because it gives you an opportunity to be brave. If you are fearless then you are just making ad hoc decisions without considering the consequences. A great leader has to be very fearful but they can’t let fear paralyse them.”
