Entrepreneur's breed

I like Randy Komisar's writings on entrepreneurship. His book 'The Monk and the Riddle' was a big hit among startup circles, not in small part due to its people, not just business, focus. He knows how to employ 'hooks' to involve the reader and get a point across, and one of the more appealing ones is the tie-in between types of entrepreneurs and dog breeds.

Randy posits that in the early stages the entrepreneur should be a 'retriever', to go out and find people, money, partners etc. Entrepreneurs have to sell their vision at this stage, though I should say the only thing our retriever sold was his own adorable self - but I guess that could work rather well for an entrepreneur too. At the next stage Randy opts for the 'bloodhound' that will sniff out the best value proposition option to build a business on and later moves on to the 'husky' that can do the 'heavy lifting' of growing the business to a huge success.

Does this mean that every startup should have three different CEOs at different stages? It is hard to say, considering there are so many stellar examples of entrepreneurs who just grew with their companies (Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Dell), but many startups, especially venture-funded ones, do bring in a different 'breed' when the company shifts to a different stage.

Personally I believe that a single breed, or a single strength, is not sufficient at any stage, and especially so in the early stages when the entrepreneur needs to wear so many different hats and be a leader, manager, prospector, evangelist, negotiator and even designer/developer in many cases. You can read the rest of the interesting interview here, but my vote for the best breed for an entrepreneur goes to the 'mutt' - a sturdy mix of all the qualities you need for the startup and the scrappiness to make it work!