Ray Kroc didn't invent the hamburger; he invented the machine that sold it. The 2016 film The Founder
History is littered with Founders who were fired by their own boards. Why? Because they refused to stop acting like a Founder. They kept rewriting code when they should have been managing managers. They kept making gut decisions when the data demanded rigor. The Founder
In the early stages, the founder is the company. Their vision is the product; their personality is the culture. However, as a startup transitions into a scale-up, the skills that made the founder successful—micromanagement, rapid pivoting, and instinctual decision-making—can become liabilities. Ray Kroc didn't invent the hamburger; he invented
Nick Offerman, far removed from his Parks and Recreation persona, is heartbreaking as Dick McDonald—the true genius who values quality over scale. Lynch and Laura Dern (as Kroc’s long-suffering wife, Ethel) provide the human collateral damage. Because they refused to stop acting like a Founder