You will always have to compromise with people. That will never go away. But the social relationship between you and your investors - and definitely not with your fellow c-levels or co-founders - will never be quite like to that between a regular employee and their boss.

Your mileage may vary if you're on the brink of collapse, of course.

One critical difference between investors and management: investors have a lot of other things to do, so they're more inclined to stay out of your way on technical details. I can't imagine a VC telling a CTO what programming language to use. Managers are under pressure to spend 40 hours per week telling others what to do, so a lot of them get trader boredom (zero-expectancy noisy activity) that adds annoying process and micromanagement.