The paper deals with the problem of founder's impact on the process of organizational development and its performance. The goal of the research is to provide a comparative analysis of activity in founder-run and non-founder-run Russian firms. In order to run this analysis 224 companies created from scratch by Russian entrepreneurs in the period of years 1992 to 1998 were studied. The statistical analysis was executed of two independent samples of companies, including 162 companies managed by the founders and 62 companies that were ran by hired professional managers. As a result of analysis there were found some differences in the following criteria: a number of employees and hierarchical levels. Nevertheless dynamics in sales of studied firms during the last 3 years were quite similar in between founder/non-founder companies. Firms managed by founders usually have less staff and less hierarchical levels than the non-founders companies.