Seth Sternberg is the CEO and Co-founder of Meebo . He previously worked in M&A at IBM. I love talking to aspiring entrepreneurs—I do it once a week at minimum. I often get asked “what’s the role of a startup CEO?” Sometimes people are curious about the pre-launch “CEO” and ask if a startup really needs one. If that CEO isn’t an engineer, what do they do anyhow? Other times people wonder what I do today as CEO of a 180 person company. In this post I’ll cover the pre-launch role, and in a follow-up, I’ll get into the role post-launch. So what does the CEO, who at the beginning is really the general business person, do at a pre-launch startup? Let’s go back to the beginning of Meebo , circa April, 2005.