Even when startups have great products and customer interest, they struggle with long-term growth. Often, our research shows, the biggest obstacles are the entrepreneurs themselves. To borrow an analogy from our Harvard Business School colleague Shikhar Ghosh, their firms aren’t murdered by the market; they commit suicide because the founders can’t or won’t adapt to the organizations’ changing needs.

Founders tend to use their personal charisma and technical smarts to rally their teams, and that can work while a business is small. But as a venture scales and becomes more complex, more operational and commercial sophistication is required to manage it. Founders may lack the skills and interest to lead those activities effectively — what they typically love is dreaming up and building products. Yet many of them insist on retaining control over all aspects of their business, even those that they don’t enjoy, which gets them into trouble.

They may try to rationalize their micromanagement by arguing that every aspect of their venture’s success hinges upon their own exacting review. But those who hold on to control too tightly become bottlenecks to organizational action, as all decisions have to pass through them. What’s more, as Noam Wasserman points out, they may forgo riches in the process of trying to stay “king.” In a recent Strategic Management Journal study with a sample of more than 6,000 companies, Wasserman discovered that founders who keep a powerful central role in their startup as it grows — controlling the board or the CEO position, or both — can harm the firm’s prospects, reducing pre-money valuation by up to 22%.

Insight Center Entrepreneurship for the Long Term Sponsored by Northern Trust Set your company up for success.

Historically, venture capitalists have bypassed founders’ limitations and desire for control by swapping in new CEOs who have more professional experience. This practice, euphemistically called “founder redeployment,” usually means “founder exit.” (That’s what the popular HBO comedy series Silicon Valley depicted at the end of last season, when fictional investors contemplated whether the geeky but brilliant Richard Hendricks should be replaced as CEO of Pied Piper.) But our interviews with VCs suggest that this practice is becoming less common with the greater availability of capital in recent fundraising markets. As a result, many founders are retaining the CEO role even when investors think they should be replaced.

Still, bringing in a “professional CEO” isn’t always the panacea it is made out to be. In many instances, large-company experience doesn’t easily translate into leading an entrepreneurial venture. Also, there is a difference between managing scale and getting to scale. While some of these new leaders from the outside are skilled at the former, they may have trouble navigating the turbulent transitions associated with the latter.

Our research suggests that a startup’s path to maturity is not quite as definitive as simply asking the founders to leave. Based on a recent sample of more than 2,600 VC-backed technology firms in the San Francisco Bay Area, we found that 45% of founder-CEOs of surviving companies are displaced by the completion of a Series C investment round. That means 55% of them remain at the helm while their company scales. Silicon Valley lore offers examples of exceptional founder-CEOs, such as Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, who were able to lead their companies through an IPO. Founders can be invaluable resources because they provide an arc of continuity from the firm’s earliest days to today. In addition to being cultural champions, they can help remind their companies not to shift their attention too far away from product strategy and innovation.

Whether the founder stays or leaves, one thing is clear: in order for a startup to successfully grow, it must be an institution that transcends any one individual. Founders who recognize this bring in partners whose skills complement their own. Together, the leadership team can build out the scaffolds to transition the venture from an organization that revolves around the founder to one that revolves around an independent company brand. We use the term “scaffolds” because the structures and processes that facilitate the scaling must be readily dismantled and rearranged. Otherwise, they are ill-suited to accommodating the firm’s rapidly changing needs.

In periods of growth, organizations will always have to figure out how to embrace the new without jettisoning what’s valuable about the old. That tension is particularly strong in a scaling startup, and founders can help mitigate it by reimagining their roles, stepping back slightly so their companies can leap forward.