Direct answer

Why am I the bottleneck in my company?

You are the bottleneck because approval authority did not transfer to the senior people you hired. The seat changed; the deciding right did not. The fix is four authority transfers in sequence: hiring authority, spending authority, customer-escalation authority, exception authority. Each one needs a named receiver, a stated standard, and a non-reversal commitment from you.

Hiring good people does not remove the bottleneck if the rights did not move with the role. A VP with a title but not the authority is a more expensive version of the same bottleneck.

The transfers must be explicit and written. Implicit authority transfers fail at the first hard exception. The exec receives the call; the founder reverses it; the team learns the authority is performative; escalations resume.

The slowest part of the fix is the founder's non-reversal commitment, not the authority transfer itself. The transfer works only when the founder accepts the receiver's output even when the founder would have decided differently.