And you are accountable to your employees. Take the board I have for example. It is a relief to know that if I’m not longer the right person they will replace me. If you are bootstrapped with 1000+ employees a board might be something you want even if you don’t need to do it from an ownership perspective.
I mean, at a certain point you're asking for ultimate power over everything and instead of attempting to become autonomous you find yourself attempting to become a supervillain
now that they're a publicly traded company, there's no way Zuckerberg could ever downsize Facebook into an honest company without the shareholders throwing a fit or suing the company.
Was there a concrete point at which you and your co-founder agreed to accept a minority stake and therefore give up absolute control? Was it a hard call to make or, already then, a relief because of the employee accountability?
Having a board of directors over you doesn't always mean dropping to a minority ownership stake, or even giving up absolute control.
The board of directors is legally responsible for running the company, in practice through major company decisions and scrutiny, so you can take some relief from that if you're a CxO doing what you think best "day to day" but not entirely sure you really know by yourself. Your board will get the legal blame if it goes seriously wrong and you've kept them sufficiently informed and involved in key decisions.
But you can still have a majority ownership stake while appointing a board. In doing so, you keep ultimate control (as shareholders) but you won't often exercise it.
Having ultimate control might change the social dynamics, but shareholders are not responsible for the company, the board of directors is and they should know it. Shareholders have the power to pass resolutions which effectively override directors, but most of the time they don't. Even if they do, it's up to the directors to figure out how to do what the shareholders want in a responsible and defensible way.
