[HN Gopher] Founder Mode
___________________________________________________________________
Founder Mode
Author : bifftastic
Score : 817 points
Date : 2024-09-01 07:35 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| namenotrequired wrote:
| Is there a recording / transcript of Chesky's talk or even a blog
| discussing its main points anywhere?
| tomhoward wrote:
| There won't be. Talks given to YC batches are off-the-record,
| to allow maximum candidness.
|
| This essay by pg is the closest you'll get to a blog post
| discussing its main points.
| elawler24 wrote:
| Listen to the Lenny's newsletter podcast episode with him, he
| goes through what I assume are similar topics -
| https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-...
| hagaetc wrote:
| He talks about some of these things on Lennys podcast from a
| few months back here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ef0juAMqoE
| Oras wrote:
| I wonder how much bad advice for startups is out there. I don't
| think it is just about scaling a startup.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| There is a lot of bad advice about almost everything people are
| interested in: learning, nutrition, exercise, personal
| finances, career development, how to code, how to write,
| relationships, running a business...
|
| Some of it is survivorship bias - often influenced by
| privilege/luck - being confused as skill or insight. Some of it
| is people who aren't very reflective, scientific or logical in
| their thinking making poor guesses or estimates with a lot of
| unmerited confidence. Some of it is more cynical: if somebody
| is buying, they're selling.
|
| As a civilisation we still aren't great at root cause analysis
| of success, it seems.
| christudor wrote:
| Another problem with advice is that in lots of cases the
| person giving the advice has absolutely no skin in the game.
| If the advice is bad, it's only the advice-taker that
| suffers.
| nelup20 wrote:
| Exactly. There can be many, many reasons why something worked
| for someone else but won't work for you. There are so many
| variables at play. Plus, a lot of advice isn't
| individualized.
|
| I really liked this talk from Patreon's CEO about bad advice:
| https://youtu.be/JTpBFiW5PBo
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| > Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's
| going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the
| company only via his or her direct reports.
|
| Jensen Huang (Nvidia) engages with only direct reports.
| genuine_smiles wrote:
| He's also got 55 direct reports
| henningpeters wrote:
| Doesn't match my experience
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| In 2010, my wife was interviewing CEOs as part of a school
| project. She emailed Jensen Huang out of the blue, to his email
| address @nvidia, and got a response and a live interview. There
| were a few others who were almost as accommodating, but,
| looking back on it from time to time, I'm still surprised by
| Jensen's openness and accessibility.
|
| So I'm thinking that although he might engage only with direct
| reports, he's accessible to his company in a general sense.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the CEO of a tech company would be responsive
| to emails from individual contributors. At least below some
| frequency.
|
| I'm completely sure that writing said email would deeply
| upset the reporting chain thus bypassed, plausibly in fired
| on the spot for unrelated reasons when they noticed.
| sethammons wrote:
| I'm not sure he is a good example. He has 55 direct reports and
| that is not normal. My best manager nearly burned herself out
| with 28 direct reports, most of which were individual
| contributors as opposed to managers. Between what I have read
| and experienced, you can have more ICs under you the more
| senior and autonomous they are, but there is a limit and
| limiting direct reports to 8-12 is a good rule of thumb. It
| gives time to meet individually every two weeks, which Huang
| doesn't do
| gizmo wrote:
| He is a good example exactly because all exceptional
| executives are super unusual. Gates, Jobs, Musk, Bezos. They
| are nothing alike.
|
| Huang defies management best practices and doesn't do 1:1
| meetings at all.
| rvnx wrote:
| It's easy to sail a boat when the wind is behind you. It's
| during storms that you can see outstanding captains. When
| Nvidia was firing part of the CUDA core devs 3 years ago,
| he wasn't considered a genius internally.
| osnium123 wrote:
| I was reading that he encourages people from the lower levels
| to also interact with him.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-ceo-shares-manageme...
| svnt wrote:
| We need to go a bit further than just calling out lying: the
| people who both appear qualified due to larger-organization
| experience, and who are looking to escape to a startup role, are
| often those whose techniques depend on the naivete of others.
| They have lived in an environment where new employees are
| fungible. Employees are not fungible in a startup.
|
| The other fatal flaw is that in larger orgs there is almost no
| existential risk to the organization from individual behavior.
| All the cloaks and daggers will get sorted out in the wash and
| Amazon will still be just fine. But this is not the case for a
| scaling startup. Bad individual behavior -- prioritizing career
| progression over company success -- especially at the expense of
| other employees, can and does sink smaller companies.
|
| I think the stage of scaling is something that industry
| experience doesn't provide a ready supply of employees to hire
| for. There are too many variants of startup company, too many
| weird starting structures, and the critical periods too short and
| intermittent.
|
| The other variable not discussed here is the environmental
| constraints. An established org can be managed because the
| environment is relatively stable. The customer base is more of a
| constraint and the financial expectations are better integrated.
| A startup is still trying to execute various transitions at this
| point, often from loss-leading to not, and this introduces more
| opportunities for chaotic regimes that need to be tightly
| regulated.
| OJFord wrote:
| > Bad individual behavior -- prioritizing career progression
| over company success
|
| I don't think that's bad behaviour (the 'especially at the
| expense of others' deliberately aside) - that's correct
| behaviour? Unless it's _your_ company. But the key is, ideally,
| to have goals aligned such that the prioritising personal
| progression means doing great things for the company.
| diggan wrote:
| I think we've all came across people who chose technologies
| based on not what would be the best for the problem at hand +
| what they have the most experience with, but instead what is
| trendy today and can help them get hired in the future at the
| next workplace.
|
| I'd probably describe that as "bad behavior" as you hire
| people believing they'll focus on improving things inside the
| company, inside of focusing on padding their CV. Of course,
| wouldn't be bad if it's both, but selecting the latter in
| front of the other seems non-optimal for the employer.
|
| If you go through enough people like that, you end up with a
| ball of software spaghetti that anyone working on will
| struggle with, instead of a polished architecture ready to
| nimbly be changed when needed.
| CM30 wrote:
| Unfortunately, I suspect the structure of the tech industry
| has kinda made this inevitable. If you need to jump ship
| every few years to get a meaningful wage increase, and
| companies are happy to drop the axe on an entire team
| because profits went down 0.01%, the incentives are to do
| whatever's needed to keep yourself hireable at all costs.
|
| So everyone picks what will look good on their resume in a
| few years, not what actually solves the issue in the most
| optimal way possible.
| elawler24 wrote:
| It's a balance. If you have people who only care about their
| career and not the company, you end up with misalignment.
| That's why hiring people who are intrinsically motivated
| matters so much. People who demand personal growth without
| having proven themselves are likely less aware of the purpose
| of their employment. I've experienced this at companies where
| many people have only worked at late-stage, pre-IPO companies
| where neither the realities of early-stage or public markets
| exists.
| svnt wrote:
| It sounds like you have never been in the position of e.g.
| establishing hiring protocols and used those not to get the
| best people into the company, but instead to ensure that no
| one who has the potential to outperform you gets hired.
|
| At the IC level sure, it is your manager's job to create
| alignment. At the hiring level pg is talking about, they are
| deciding which of those people to bring in, and they think
| about it in at least as much detail as you when you design
| the intricate functions of the next product you ship.
|
| Think about it like this: you have the chance to build a
| product that wins every trial but you won't get anything more
| in the process, or you can design a product that is less
| competitive and sends you personally $<meaningful_amount>
| every time it is trialed, whether or not they buy. Assume no
| one will ever be able to definitively prove which one you
| did.
| gizmo wrote:
| The big thing missing from pg's essay is how the professional
| managerial class has this big filter where only those who are
| willing to jump through hoops for 20 years get to the c-suite. In
| businesses of any size it's just not possible to get promoted
| straight up the ranks in your 20s no matter how good you are.
| Seniority trumps ability. Founders are excluded from this filter
| process and to nobody's surprise founders tend to be very
| different from professional managers but more than that: highly
| effective founders are nothing like each other either.
|
| This should be screaming evidence that the standard way
| businesses are run filters out the most capable and most
| effective people from executive positions. This is the kind of
| thing you would expect profit-driven enterprises to actually care
| about, but no such luck because the executives who are positioned
| to make this change are exactly the people who should get
| replaced with extremely capable oddballs.
| bboygravity wrote:
| It does (rarely) happen though. Example: how Ryan Cohen (self-
| made billionaire founder of Chewy) got himself into a different
| established company. He bought enough shares for himself, took
| over the board of an established company and put in some of his
| own, replaced the shitty CEO (by himself) and turned an
| established declining company around to profitability and
| possibly long-term growth.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Let's ignore the fact that GameStop is a meme-stock.
|
| Has Cohen actually improved the company? Revenue keeps
| falling, year by year, and other than having more cash on
| hand - not much seems to be changing.
|
| Seems to me that every positive thing that happened to the
| company, can be credited to the pumping of the stock. The
| fundamentals haven't changed much.
| intelVISA wrote:
| > filters out the most capable and most effective people from
| executive positions
|
| Well, yes, because generally somebody who is actually 'the most
| capable and most effective' will simply be running their own
| business, why would they waste time climbing the ranks to work
| for somebody else's yacht?
|
| The filter exists because whilst PMCs can't build the ship, a
| founder can, they're fine at keeping it away from the rocks
| enough for relevant parties to extract wealth and guard it from
| the risks posed by hotshot up and comers.
|
| Remeber the avg corp is relying on regulatory capture and
| offshore Java, maybe wrapping OpenAI if it's YC funded -
| there's barely double digit innovative tech companies for this
| mythical employee to even captain.
| samvher wrote:
| > somebody who is actually 'the most capable and most
| effective' will simply be running their own business, why
| would they waste time climbing the ranks
|
| Maybe I'm being naive, but I think a large part of running a
| successful business is having a well defined niche / problem
| you solve. Getting to that point comes with a bunch of
| barriers and risks, and joining an organization that has that
| already figured out seems like it can have some advantages?
| kragen wrote:
| pubmed centrals? politico-media complexes?
| guccii wrote:
| professional managerial class
| Spivak wrote:
| > why would they waste time climbing the ranks
|
| Because their role in a company is support like CFO, CIO,
| CPO, CMO (and honestly CEO). The startup lifecycle where
| "person or people who make or design the product muddling
| along the other business functions until they're big enough
| to need someone specialized" doesn't really work for an
| accountant.
| btbuildem wrote:
| > it's just not possible to get promoted straight up the ranks
| in your 20s no matter how good you are. Seniority trumps
| ability.
|
| Experience. Experience and wisdom is what trumps the exuberant
| overconfidence of an ignorant youth.
| gizmo wrote:
| Businesses periodically have to reinvent themselves in order
| to survive. But it's hard for experienced executives to
| accept that the playbook that worked for 20 years no longer
| does. Businesses fail when executives refuse to accept that
| their accumulated wisdom and experience has lost its value.
| Exuberant youthful ignorance isn't everything but neither is
| being an excellent navigator of a world that no longer
| exists.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Worryingly sounds like the US government!
| aorloff wrote:
| The problem is that very few manager-capable younger folks can
| truly embrace the thing that has to be done to become a great
| manager, and that is to cease being an IC.
|
| Every startup actually discourages this, which is why so few
| startups have great young managers.
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| I am beginning to think we could a learn a lot about
| organizational principles from complex minds. Our current
| organizational principles for companies, city-states, countries
| are very early in our exploration of these. Complex minds, on the
| other hands, are here after a multi-billion year journey. We are
| just learning more about them. One fundamental principle is that
| you have to be in touch with "reality". The more layers of
| computation you have, the harder it is without the right
| feedback. Even impossible. In companies you lose that feedback
| loop with the "hire good people, treat their divisions as black-
| boxes" approach. In countries you lose that with autocratic
| central command. Complex minds simply cannot afford to do that
| because the moment you start hallucinating (imagine a reality
| that is not grounded in the real) you become lunch. The feedback
| mechanisms ensure that top-down expectations (ideas) are _always_
| matched up with bottom-up data.
|
| That is another profound truth that's just lost entirely. Data is
| not information. And information is not data (reality). We must
| have the ability to both "see" the real data and also recognize
| the translation of that data into information to make good
| choices. The more layers in your org, the harder it is without
| feedback mechanisms that allow the bottom, reality-facing side of
| your org to pass on critical stuff without the interpretation and
| loss of middle-layers. Remember, you are an org too, a
| 37-trillion cell org that coheres as one in such a beautiful way
| you think of yourself as one "I" Long way before we find
| principles that allow us to do the same with companies and
| countries.
| wqtz wrote:
| > He followed this advice and the results were disastrous.
|
| The whole idea of this article hinges on this sentence. What
| disasterous thing happened exactly? Considering the premise seems
| to be missing, dare I say, this article seems to rhetorical.
| thomastraum wrote:
| yeah for sure he invented a premise to then write an article
| about something thats rhetorical. how does that thinking make
| sense.
|
| Airbnb struggled for a while (in his opinion) until he changed
| his management style organized the whole company around a
| release cylce (and other bits I cant remember) and taking on
| much bigger responsibility for design (UI UX). its super
| interesting stuff. its not new actually and I saw him speaking
| about multiple times on youtube.
| https://www.perplexity.ai/search/brian-chesky-interview-orga...
| jasode wrote:
| _> The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like
| modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org
| chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do,
| and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved
| in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them,
| which is bad.
|
| >Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds
| great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in
| practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what
| this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let
| them drive the company into the ground.
|
| >One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to
| founders afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel
| like they're being gaslit from both sides -- by the people
| telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and
| by the people working for them when they do. [...] , and C-level
| execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the
| world._
|
| Those 3 paragraphs are similar to the description from Slava
| Akhmechet in an 2018 HN comment[1] and matches my experience :
|
| _> When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select
| into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as
| much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher
| rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of
| engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might
| think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good
| the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes
| perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the
| world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll
| self select some of these people who will slip past their
| psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're
| good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at
| slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half
| their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running
| around your company within a month or two.
|
| >From the founders's perspective the org is basically an
| overactive genie. It will do what you say, but not what you mean.
| Want to increase sales in two quarters? No problem, sales
| increased. Oh, and we also subtly destroyed our customers's
| trust. Once the steaks are high, founders basically have to treat
| their org as an adversarial agent. You might think -- but a good
| founder will notice! Doesn't matter how good you are -- you've
| selected world class politicians that are good at getting past
| your exact psychological makeup. Anthropic principle!_
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253
| eevilspock wrote:
| One might say the same of founders, but with respect to the org
| they are a part of: society. Founder? Nope, professional money
| extractor.
|
| Anyone who's critical of, which is to say critically aware of,
| the underlying nature of capitalism will get what I'm saying.
|
| Elon Musk (who proofread PG's post) is a master at extracting
| money from society and its government, while extracting labor
| from workers for minimal pay.[1] Zuck is a master at extracting
| money from society (by maximally playing to people's addictive
| tendencies and selling their attention to companies who want to
| extract more!). These types are driven by money and power, not
| by bettering society, though as masters of extraction they are
| masters of selling themselves as the latter.
|
| Compare them to people who are driven not by money but by a
| desire to contribute: Albert Einstein, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus
| Torvalds. If capitalism/markets were efficient, Albert Einstein
| would have been the richest person in the world, not Musk. The
| inventor of the web would be worth a lot more than the inventor
| of a web app that prey's upon people's addictive tendencies.
| Linus Torvalds' baby runs the internet (and android phones) yet
| his net worth is... Remember how Microsoft said open source was
| un-American, akin to communism? Now Microsoft is a master at
| extracting money from open source.
|
| Capitalism's measure of net worth (money in the bank) does not
| correlate to actual net worth (positive impact on society).
|
| ---
|
| [1]: btw, how is the Founder Mode he instituted at what was
| formally known as Twitter working out?
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm not sure the web an Linux can be judged with todays
| valuation in mind. Both succeeded through openness not
| capitalism. Einstein was from a whole different society.
| detourdog wrote:
| I thought it was a great start to an idea. I think it went
| sideways once it decided founder mode could be studied and
| taught.
|
| Teaching founder mode sounds as simple as teaching creativity or
| how to be an individual. Founders are most likely are made up of
| people divergent of social thinking in some way and have a non-
| verbal need inside trying to get out.
|
| Founder mode is fed by an intense focus, desperation, and
| insight. Which are all difficult to teach.
|
| The whole thing feels off to me. Isn't the VCs that try to stop
| Founder mode. I think SV has a slew of carcasses of companies
| that founder modeded to death.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| I don't think he's suggesting we can teach how to be a good
| founder in general. Just that we can study and then teach the
| difference between managing a team as a founder vs general
| management practices
| theGnuMe wrote:
| There's also the concept that companies that succeed, succeed
| despite themselves.
|
| You have catch the wave; otherwise you do a lot of paddling.
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm sort of a believer in that. Since it prioritizes being
| lucky.
| detourdog wrote:
| I could sort of see that but that is almost too much common
| sense. Be a supportive of your precious founder.
|
| The other question I have been asking myself is regarding the
| SJobs retreats. They definitely happened during the Macintosh
| era but were they used during the second era. My impression
| is that they created a toxicity. It makes sense that CEO of
| large organization will hear names through the grapevine and
| want to get direct input.
|
| I see the founder to be idiosyncratic and there is alway
| tension be that a desire for consistent environment. I think
| a good founder is able to compartmentalize the idiosyncratic
| from the supportive resource mechanics were humans like
| consistency.
|
| No doubt SJobs was in Founder mode when he had all the CNCs
| at NeXT painted black and distorting the machine's
| tolerances.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| > VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of
| engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too.
|
| Wasn't this obvious? I've been in the software industry for long
| enough to distinguish people who do actual work from those who
| don't. All the VPs I've encountered share the following traits:
|
| - huge paychecks
|
| - they hire others under their supervision to do the actual job
|
| - you don't actually know what their job is because they all
| delegate
|
| So, it always seemed to me that being a VP always meant: no
| matter what you do (good decisions or bad ones) you are getting
| paid tons of money. It's worse when these VPs come from faang-
| like companies: they are treated like gods who know everything
| and you cannot contradict them.
| Kiro wrote:
| What are you quoting?
| mkl wrote:
| Seems like it's supposed to be a reply to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41415637 by jasode,
| which is in turn quoting
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253 by coffeemug in
| 2018.
| sethammons wrote:
| I've worked with two amazing VPs of eng, one of which unified
| our ops and dev teams in purpose and goals, and the other was
| able to re-focus us from firefighting to sustainable growth in
| engineering projects. They were worth, literally, their weight
| in gold to the success of the company. These happened at a
| hundred person eng dept and a 300 person eng org if I recall.
|
| I have also worked with a couple who I am not sure what they
| did. And a couple that I think were actively harmful by not
| taking actions, letting problems steep, and pursuing pie in the
| sky solutions ("we could expand from our core product to offer
| our $internl_tool_that_barely_works, let's overly fund that
| while customers churn on quality issues")
|
| And fwiw, I have yet to have a positive experience from an ex-
| googler and it is more of a toss up with former amazon folks.
| They are simply too used to white glove systems that have had,
| literally, billions spent developing these systems to the
| custom problems of these mega orgs.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| > I've worked with two amazing VPs of eng
|
| I'm at a startup that is at an earlier stage than your two
| examples. Our CEO hired a VP Eng on a tight schedule and
| didn't give the engineering team an opportunity to interview
| him. I was definitely suspicious, especially given past
| experiences with the "professional manager" types we're all
| discussing here. The day I knew it was going to be fine was
| the day I went into the shop early, discovered that the
| lights were already on, and found him in the back laying out
| a bunch of holes to drill in an aluminum plate.
|
| "Uhhhh what's up man?"
|
| "The mounting plate from the contractors didn't fit right so
| I'm making a new one. I know you guys have electronics to
| mount and test today and don't want you to be blocked"
|
| "...need a hand?"
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > They were worth, literally, their weight in gold
|
| That's correct. They do nothing, but when that nothing is
| actually done well, it shows.
|
| Unfortunately, this is not common.
| sethammons wrote:
| > They do nothing
|
| ... but I explicitly stated what they did and it was not
| nothing
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Your list doesn't include a lot of "doing". It's only
| achievements.
| coahn wrote:
| The premise of this is that advice to hire "Hire good people and
| give them room to do their jobs" is bad because that turns into
| "hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the
| ground".
|
| So, if I get this right, hiring is done by the founder, who is
| not capable of choosing good people in a sea of fakers, and
| because of founders incompetency the advice is bad?
|
| I do agree that every founder/CEO should have a tool for gauging
| how their company is behaving out of their bubble, but I see this
| new mode as a dangerous proposition which will invite all sorts
| of paranoid founders/managers to take micromanaging/abuse to a
| whole new level.
|
| Maybe a better question founders(VCs) should be asking themselves
| is why are there so many "professional fakers" in top/middle
| level positions, instead of figuring out how to augment their
| behavior?
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| I think because you can't give C-level/(senior) manager
| candidates whiteboard interviews. The answers are all "it
| depends" and also depend on how the person explains it. Not to
| mention tech founders are usually technical people who are not
| used to bullshitters.
|
| Your concern is valid, but since the company is their "baby",
| they care more than those for-hire professionals who can go to
| greener pastures.
| bjornsing wrote:
| > Your concern is valid, but since the company is their
| "baby", they care more than those for-hire professionals who
| can go to greener pastures.
|
| This is the main aspect I think, that everyone keeps missing.
| The "professional fakers" work first and foremost for
| themselves. They make great decisions, for them. But not
| necessarily for the company.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| Also, I'm 99% sure that Steve Job once said (paraphrasing): "We
| don't hire talented people to tell them what to do, we hire
| them to tell us what to do". Which to me sounds like "Hire good
| people and give them room to do their jobs". So there is a
| discrepancy here as Steve Job is also used as an example of a
| "Founder Mode" CEO.
|
| Not saying there is a contradiction, just a piece missing
| somewhere in the essays logic.
| mejutoco wrote:
| I believe it was Henry Ford, or maybe both.
| kragen wrote:
| henry ford was also pretty far from this warren buffett
| mode of letting the upper management of the company do what
| they want. very deeply involved in every level of the
| company, much like steve jobs
| kijin wrote:
| Letting your employees tell you what you need to do is not
| the same as giving them room to do what they want.
|
| In the former, you are immediately aware of what they're
| doing and why, because they're telling you! You can ask
| questions if their reasoning doesn't sound convincing,
| intervene early if there's disagreement as to what should be
| done, and decide whose project takes priority. Steve Jobs was
| a very active CEO in this regard. Bullshitters will not
| survive long in such an organization.
|
| The latter, on the other hand, is often taken to imply that
| you should not intervene unless absolutely necessary -- which
| often means, until it's too late.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| I believe you're right. That was the piece I was missing.
| And it makes a big difference indeed.
| elawler24 wrote:
| Staying in the details is different from micromanagement. It's
| the difference between understanding (and deeply caring) about
| what's happening vs. telling ICs how to solve a problem. You
| can't be a good leader, mentor, or decision maker if you're not
| invested in the details.
| kragen wrote:
| are we talking about steve jobs here? iphone in the fishtank
| steve jobs? roundrects are everywhere steve jobs? because
| that sounds pretty close to telling ics how to solve a
| problem
| _1tan wrote:
| Is there a good resource on the management methods of Steve Jobs
| as indicated by the essay?
| huhkerrf wrote:
| The thing about Jobs is that he's become whoever you want him
| to be. If you believe yourself a visionary, he's the one to
| emulate. But, conversely, you can't visit Linkedin for a second
| without seeing the Jobs quote about hiring smart people and
| getting out of their way. (Ironically, considering the point of
| this essay.)
| rl3 wrote:
| The essence of Founder Mode is simple: The founder's principal
| duty is to communicate a vision to their team and ensure that
| vision is executed faithfully to the spirit of the vision. This
| is precisely what Jobs did effectively and why he was successful.
|
| Involving oneself at all levels of the company is by no means at
| odds with avoiding micromanagement. Likewise, neither is
| empowering people in your company with degrees of creative
| freedom that are aligned with the vision.
|
| SV dogma dictates selecting for hustle, which is merely one trait
| in the equation. There's a lot of people out there with great
| hustle, executing on visions that aren't worth a damn. Some of
| these people then land large funding rounds and find themselves
| unsure of what to do, and end up succumbing to VC pressure to do
| something stupid that's wholly incongruent with their business
| (as opposed to _the stupid things which are wholly congruent_ ).
| For example, hiring bloodsucking C-suite and V-suite types.
|
| Here's how I'd select if I ran an accelerator, in no particular
| order:
|
| _- Minimum 5 years working on the project already, ideally a
| decade_
|
| _- Founder has decided it 's what they want to do with their
| life_
|
| _- Has a list of the first 100+ people they 're going to hire
| picked out, with detailed explanations of who these people are
| and why they make sense_
|
| _- Has a plan to sell each independently wealthy person on that
| list on why they 'll be happy working the project when money
| isn't their primary concern_
|
| _- Has a plan to sell investors who hopefully aren 't VCs
| (because most suck)_
|
| _- Has otherwise found VCs that don 't suck_
|
| _- Solid character; kind human being with principles_
|
| _- Decent hustle acceptable; high perseverance required_
|
| Suffice it to say someone fitting these criteria probably
| wouldn't even get that precious 10-minute YC interview. Neither
| would most of the so-called eccentric folks out there. They'd be
| deemed failures. Or crazy. _Especially_ the solo founders.
|
| Speaking of dogma, there's a lot of emphasis placed on both
| coming up with business ideas and then externally validating
| those. Any founder that has a legitimate, deep-seated vision will
| find those concepts offensive. After all, Jobs is famous for the
| following quote:
|
| _' Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But
| that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're
| going to want before they do.'_
|
| I omitted the rest, which was an apocryphal misquote of Henry
| Ford. Of course, Jobs was also needlessly ruthless and cruel.
| However, despite being an asshole, he was at least a world-class
| vision guy.
| xwolfi wrote:
| But wasnt Jobs fired and replaced by a Pepsi CEO because he was
| so toxic the company was running aground ?
| sudhirj wrote:
| Most references to Jobs' management style refer to his second
| term, presumably after he matured a bit.
| richardburton wrote:
| This is why people love working for Elon Musk.
|
| Anyone can raise problem with him & he will fix it directly.
| rl3 wrote:
| > _This is why people love working for Elon Musk._
|
| On HN, placing the _/ s_ annotation after a sentence is often
| encouraged to denote sarcasm.
| detourdog wrote:
| I would think sarcasm is inappropriate in public discourse.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I've decided a while back that I will never work with these kinds
| of "professional" liars ever again. The lies will always
| accumulate and ruin every goddamn thing. I'd rather be unemployed
| and barely scraping by than worry if some psychopath is going to
| piss away 10 years of my hard work.
|
| I think truth seeking is more important than any particular mode
| of operation. Founders are more likely to do this because they
| genuinely want to win the entire game, not just Q3.
|
| I think I've already seen a few managers walking around in
| founder's garb. Again, these people are _professional liars_.
| They 're going to be hard to spot unless you're looking for it.
|
| My next venture will probably involve unconditional dictatorship
| with hair trigger termination policies for deceptive behavior.
| Until then, I'll be working smaller contract jobs and otherwise
| scraping by.
| picafrost wrote:
| I struggle to see "founder mode" as something that scales. Is
| there not some self-selection bias occurring here, given the
| audience "included a lot of the most successful founders we've
| funded"?
|
| If a founder is exceptional and all of the other stars necessary
| for a startup to succeed have aligned, this may be a good
| approach. But then we are just back to the question YC has always
| tried to answer: what makes a founder exceptional?
|
| What about the founders who failed _because_ they were in
| "founder mode"?
|
| I am not sure this article represents the beginning of a paradigm
| shift like it seems to think it does.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Isn't the point of founder mode that it doesn't scale? It's the
| wrong mode in all cases except the one where the founder is
| still in charge. It doesn't scale, but it doesn't need to.
| resonious wrote:
| It clearly doesn't scale infinitely, which is why PG says you
| still need to delegate.
|
| The argument seems to be that if you understand the business as
| deeply as the founder does, you can get away with selectively
| breaking some conventional management wisdom.
| picafrost wrote:
| I think I have made a poor choice by using the word "scales".
| I do not mean within the lifetime of the company -- that much
| is clear -- but scales across different startups, founders,
| and niches.
| gbin wrote:
| What is described here is for me a competent technical manager.
| As they scale, it is just that their focus cannot be on
| everything at the same time so they need to pick what is the
| most important and help a specific team at specific times. It
| also means that they need a good bullshit detector to dodge
| those that are skilled at "managing up" and know the real
| underlying state. Unfortunately the organizations tend to
| follow Peter's principle and you end up with incompetent
| managers everywhere that just "manage" and don't understand
| what is made or how.
| Sammi wrote:
| Steve Jobs scaled it. Brian Chesky, maybe the Zuck and Elon?
| There are multiple examples.
| alok-g wrote:
| I would be interested in hearing about Wolfram Research too,
| if someome knows.
| mitko wrote:
| Maybe one way to think of it is _fractal management_ where a
| manager would have deep read-write interactions with few skip
| levels. HBR style says read everywhere, write only direct
| reports. And it makes for a good software design except that
| humans are not computers, but there is a shared global context
| - the company vision and mission.
|
| Through fractal management, a visionary leader can have a
| better chance to ensure that the vision is translated into
| practice at the various levels of detail.
|
| Fractal management is only part of it, though as it is a
| technique, but it doesn't cover the enormous skin in the game
| founders have about the success of the company. For many
| founders, the company is their baby(I am projecting here) and
| they want to make it succeed. Contrastingly, many of the
| professional fakers instead see it as just a job, and a step on
| the ladder. Principal/agent. Without genuine care, and cohesive
| vision, fractal management can quickly devolve into chaos. It
| is high reward and also _higher risk_!!! Maybe that's why only
| the founders do it but not their VPs. I wonder if any VPs at
| Airbnb are doing anything remotely similar to what Bryan Chesky
| is doing as management style? (Honestly I have no idea)
|
| I am sure that many founders failed also because of it as they
| might have been missing the charisma, clarity and conviction to
| pull this off.
|
| (PS. Take my ideas with a big serving of salt, I am a founder
| but not at a large organization, and the article mainly focuses
| on large orgs)
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I think we too often look at Jobs and say "look it works"
| instead of looking at the 90% of start ups that fail.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| One of the contenders for the biggest company in the world is
| doing it well at scale.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-ceo-shares-manageme...
| convolvatron wrote:
| why are we so fixated on scaling companies? there are certainly
| more companies that simply failed because they thought they
| needed to put in the organizational structure to be huge rather
| than doing what startups are supposed to do - be plucky and
| creative and work work hard and create something of unique
| value. that's enough to get you your 9 figure exit. maybe
| companies have lifecycles, and maybe blowing out an org chart 4
| levels deep is a problem for the next team?
| philip1209 wrote:
| I learned a lot from Brian Chesky's interview with Lenny's
| Newsletter and by seeing the failures of "manager mode" at mid-
| stage tech companies.
|
| Here's what we say on our jobs page [1] - strongly inspired by
| Chesky + Gumroad + nordic office culture:
|
| > We operate with a fairly flat hierarchy and operate with high
| trust of each other. The code, copy, or designs you make will
| often go straight to production with little discussion or
| modification. Everybody is welcome to give their opinions,
| inputs, and ideas on the product.
|
| > Our style of work isn't for everybody. You have a lot of
| freedom in how to work, but not a lot of freedom in what to work
| on. There isn't much mentorship, community, or discussion. If you
| need help, we're quick to respond and help - but if we don't hear
| from you, we assume things are going well.
|
| On the footnote about "Founders who are unable to delegate even
| things they should will use founder mode as the excuse" - a
| learning I've had is the importance of operating with a high
| degree of trust within this system. I set the objective but then
| can't focus too closely on the tactics. So, I shouldn't second-
| guess the libraries an engineer decides to use when building a
| ticket.
|
| "Founder mode" only works if you can modulate where you make
| decisions. You need to grant some autonomy to people in making
| their own decisions. That's not to say that the Founder can't
| override somebody on something detailed like a button label - but
| those should be about setting the bar for quality of execution,
| not putting yourself in the critical path of everything. Founders
| should focus on the decisions that matter, not being a gatekeeper
| for every little change.
|
| [1] https://usefind.ai/jobs
| caseymarquis wrote:
| I've been occasionally mentioning this book on HN since I read
| it. Linked below. The book is about how companies evolve and how
| teams of people work together. It uses human growth as an analogy
| and fairly accurately describes how companies fail or thrive at
| different stages. It's older at this point, but it's about human
| behavior and group dynamics, which don't change rapidly.
|
| The book doesn't use the phrase founder mode, but it discusses
| the transition from a founder oriented company to a culture
| oriented company in detail.
|
| The human analog works well here. Advice for parenting a baby,
| toddler, child, or teenager is all different. People's needs
| change over time. At a certain point people become adults and
| need mentoring more than parenting.
|
| Almost every article on how to run a company fails to qualify the
| stage of growth that the company is in. Once you start thinking
| about how companies evolve over time (somewhat predictably), it
| changes your perspective. PG is right in the correct context.
| Those advising AirBNB are also correct, in the right context.
| Following either piece of advice blindly is just living in a
| cargo cult.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Corporate-Lifecycles-Ichak-A...
|
| (Like any business book, it's at least 20% BS, but the remaining
| 80% is quite good. If you do read the book, do not read the first
| few chapters and assume you've gotten the whole idea. The book
| has a very good paradigm on worker profiles and what is needed in
| different stages of growth in its later chapters.)
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I think the BS/quite good split for business books is more like
| 80/20 or maybe even 90/10.
| justmarc wrote:
| I think there's just a fundamentally different level of "care"
| between founder, and manager. Just like that of a parent vs
| teacher.
| gizmo wrote:
| No that's not it. Conventional managers are very ambitious and
| sincerely want their business to do great.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am writing a book about an idea - software literacy is a new
| form of actual literacy and will be as impactful.
|
| And I keep coming back to how important organising above the
| Dunbar number is and how bad economics etc is at this.
|
| This resonates for me - and it's still just grasping in the dark
| - but they seem to revolve around the idea that with software a
| company is no longer a lot of Dunbar number tribes working
| together through politics of their representatives (managers) but
| that action through the whole company can be co-ordinated through
| software (I even have the idea that the workers are CPUs so the
| coders are new managers).
|
| Anyway the point is that founder mode might mean simply
| acknowledging that software runs / orgnaisies a company more than
| anything else - and building for that. What's more important if
| your whole company is software controlled - relations between
| managers or the whole-org-test-rig?
|
| Edit: apple famously has a run-book that is insanely detailed -
| basically instructions on how to run the org that builds the
| iPhone - this is software running a whole compmay. And if it's
| software, it can be in one repo and that repo can be owned by
| Steve Jobs. Conceptually- that's founder mode.... Maybe :-)
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Do you have any more information on the run-book concept?
| M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote:
| I'm unable to keep up with book updates because both of the
| links on your profile are broken
| puzanov wrote:
| Using Dunbar number as an indicator for the conpany growth and
| how to use this number to form better org structire is a valid
| idea
| mcculley wrote:
| There is a more charitable explanation for the different outcomes
| than assuming that the professional management class are all
| "fakers". Every business has to decide how much of their org
| chart and processes should be industry standard and how much
| should be proprietary. Those businesses that do everything the
| standard way are too similar to competitors to provide greater
| value. Ideally, you want your competitors to misunderstand why
| you are doing things differently.
| telesilla wrote:
| Good to see this essay, it resonates a lot with me after a hard
| week with staff which fortunately had a positive outcome in the
| end thanks to what I've come to believe is important. Having been
| through several disasters as a founder and come through: scaling
| is possible through clear, direct communication and setting
| heuristics that are important to _you_ as the founder, and having
| senior management develop processes. Iterate through each
| failure, develop stronger heuristics and documentation,
| communicate and communicate and communicate again and again to
| your team and you should find that over time it 's embedded in
| culture as if it were written in stone. "Hire good people and let
| them do their job" has only worked for me once we were in full
| agreement on the outcomes, including budget, time, resources and
| how we treat each other.
| blueboo wrote:
| Founder mode is implementing cliches well (hire pros, empower
| with agency) and manager mode is implementing them poorly (hire
| fakes, watch them fail)
|
| That's it, folks. As always, the devil's in the details, not the
| Startup School maxims.
|
| As Ed Catmull said, (lightly paraphrased) "everyone says story is
| everything, even if their story is drek...once you reduce an idea
| to a concise phrase you can use it without risk of changing
| behavior. What really matters is, what are you going to do about
| it?"
| Archelaos wrote:
| While the problem description of how to scale a small company to
| a larger one and the solution offered of skipping the corporate
| hierarchy every now and then and being careful about delegating
| too much autonomy have merit, the main reason given by the author
| as to why the black box model of leadership is problematic does
| not seem very convincing to me, to say the least: "... in
| practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what
| this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let
| them drive the company into the ground."
|
| If this really is the way founders describe it, it sounds more
| like a blame game: I, as the founder, was successful on my own
| when the company was small; now I have organised the company into
| a kind of small sub-companies that are not as successful; ergo,
| the pseudo-founders I hired for these sub-companies are
| impostors.
|
| Rather, I think that we are "simply" dealing with fundamental
| management problems that have nothing to do with whether a
| company is relatively new or a century old, or run by a founder
| or run by a manager. It is more about size and managing
| innovation on a large scale, the flow of information and, to
| borrow terms from the military, a well-balanced command and
| control between strategic, operational and tactical levels.
| tikkun wrote:
| Founder mode examples I've noticed:
|
| 1. Steve Jobs approach:
|
| - Multiple teams tackling the same problem with different
| approaches (done for Mac OS X and iPhone)
|
| - Let the best approach win
|
| 2. Nat Friedman's take: "The cultural
| prohibition on micromanagement is harmful. Great individuals
| should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment. The goal is
| not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels
| of excellence in some dimension. The downsides are worth it"
|
| 3. Stay connected to the customer
|
| - Have a separate early adopter version of your product even when
| your company is big
|
| - Founders taking customer calls (Eric Yuan, Zoom)
|
| - Checking customer notes on X (Brian Chesky does this)
|
| - Reading external cold emails from customers to the CEO, and
| replying to some (Steve Jobs and Bezos did this)
|
| 4. Stay connected to the reality of the company
|
| - Anyone internally can email the CEO and suggest ideas, critique
| things
|
| 5. Have redundancy
|
| - For any areas of the company that are critical, run two
| separate versions for as long as possible
|
| - Humans have two of basically everything critical (except the
| brain, likely due to energy constraints): reproductive organs,
| hands, legs, eyes, ears, nostrils, why don't companies
| hun3 wrote:
| > (except the brain, likely due to energy constraints)
|
| We have neuroplasticity :')
| naveen99 wrote:
| I don't really understand why companies block lower level
| people from emailing ceo...
|
| I would think you could get chatgpt to rank the emails in some
| way...
| raziel2p wrote:
| chatgpt (or an equivalent) may also be able to write an email
| crafted to get to the top of that ranking.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Well once ai agents become independent, and they start
| becoming full time employees, they should be allowed too...
| dasil003 wrote:
| Because the judgment of tens of thousands of individuals on
| the importance of their particular issues and the framing of
| said issues in a way the CEO can understand does not
| correlate with their disposition towards emailing the CEO.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Thats fine. But why not allow it anyway. Ceo can still
| ignore...
| mitko wrote:
| Tony Fadell's idea of a Parent CEO vs Babysitter CEO in Build
| comes close to this founded mode concept but I am so glad PG
| memed the founder mode concept into existence, and talk about the
| gaslighting. And I bet he is right about there are many founders
| operating somewhat that way already but without a shared mental
| model and a name to it.
|
| It is really hard to put in practice because of all the
| gravitational pull towards mediocrity.
| lokimedes wrote:
| As a hybrid MBA-Dev-PhysicsPhD who has refused to give up my
| technical and scientific skills to join the caste of managers,
| this resonates deeply with me. My guess to the effectiveness of
| "founder mode" is that this it legitimizes skill-boundary-
| crossing. When even competent engineers become MBAs, they can get
| disavowed by fellow engineers, and all level of technical input
| is "micromanaging". But having full-scope founder-level rights to
| call BS at all levels, and do real time risk assessments af low
| levels while automatically matching it with the company mission,
| is so uniquely valuable, that the lack thereof is enough for me
| to posit that to be what we see when management changes. - It
| isn't universally applicable, you do need to be gifted in the
| various aspects of the company, but still.
| eevilspock wrote:
| Isn't Twitter doing much better now Musk has returned it to
| Founder mode?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Sounds like bad recruiting.
| elawler24 wrote:
| Even as an early-stage founder, I get advised by smart people
| including investors, other founders, and past coworkers to hire
| other people to "help" me with hard problems. There has been some
| fantasy in the past decade that you become good at something as
| either a manager or IC or company - then get compensated highly,
| in perpetuity, to oversee others who do the hard work from that
| point forward. Today it's being replaced by the new Brian Chesky
| ethos of accountability. I hope to see it bring back more
| aspirational builders back to the world of tech, replacing bloat
| and complacency. There is no easy button to creating outsized
| returns, so we should stop pretending.
| parakalan wrote:
| I joined Glean recently and found out that hiring really smart
| people and letting them cook is a legit strategy, not sure if it
| disproves this article.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Bring Back Steve Jobs!
| brainless wrote:
| I think the most important thing a founder brings is to "not give
| up". The journey of most startups that innovate is complicated,
| unknown and unusual. Traditional management is not made for this.
| I have always felt that "pivot" comes from "founder mode" itself.
| It is one way of keep trying, even when a founder accepts that
| the original idea is not working well. Many founders have
| attempted and failed multiple times to finally get to something
| that works. This value is less visible in any other domain of
| management.
| mihaic wrote:
| After two unsuccessful but still alive start-ups, I've come to
| very similar conclusions. Absolutely every single time I've tried
| to say to it anyone other than a founder I was met with disbelief
| that eventually turned into accusations of not knowing how to be
| a leader.
|
| While I do admit that I didn't fire people as quickly as I should
| have, most of our structural problems came from employees simply
| doing what was best for them and bad for the company, and most of
| them not even realizing or caring to think about the long-term
| consequences of their actions. My main lesson was that almost
| nothing can be delegated except to other founders or some
| exceptionally rare adults. Success in scaling seems to be
| actually more in making sure the things you do are simple enough
| that employees can't mess them up.
|
| From founder reactions I've had when telling this, I think a lot
| more people have come to internalize similar beliefs, but none
| will publicly say them since they don't want to risk PR backlash.
| elawler24 wrote:
| This is especially when there's less VC money available to
| support mediocre outcomes. It's also on the founder to disclose
| the realities of the startup to employees. If we don't raise
| money, we can't pay salaries. If we don't make a product, we
| won't find customers. If we don't find customers, we won't
| raise money. It's a never ending cycle until someone does the
| hard work to break the loop.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Where the founders are also acting in their self interest but
| have enough correlation between self and company that this
| works out? If so non-trivial equity to non-founders might have
| the same properties, provided they haven't already been savaged
| by founder liquidity preferences.
| usernamed7 wrote:
| > most of our structural problems came from employees simply
| doing what was best for them and bad for the company
|
| I've seen this play out a lot as well with management. It's a
| classic principle/agent problem and one of the best solutions
| i've seen is flatter orgs where everyone has a primary work
| responsibility beyond pure management.
| mdorazio wrote:
| How did you incentivize people to do what was best for the
| company rather than only for themselves? What percentage of it
| did they own? Why _should_ they ignore their own self-interest
| in favor of _your_ company 's long-term success?
|
| There's a weird cognitive dissonance I've run into where career
| advice from most people on HN boils down to "Companies don't
| care about you. Optimize your own total comp. Jump ship when
| opportunities come up. Don't bother with loyalty." And then on
| the flip side you have founders who expect employees to act
| like the company is their family, but with zero reason to do
| so.
|
| I think there must be a better way to get employees, and
| especially executives, to care about a company's long-term
| success rather than about quarterly goals and near-term comp.
| I'm not sure what that is, but I think it might need to be
| related to shares in a profit-sharing plan rather than
| traditional equity shares.
| neom wrote:
| Long term thinking + high quality story telling.
|
| Just gotta keep it up as you scale. At around 200-300
| employees your job in leadership is simply telling the same
| story over and over again to different constituencies in
| different ways, for years.
| rvnx wrote:
| It's not about how much they get. The reality is that you can
| give 100k extra to a software engineer, he will still prefer
| his kids and wife.
|
| Money isn't buying love.
|
| You can hire a prostitute, she will work for you, but she
| will still not love you.
|
| This is the same with companies.
| alok-g wrote:
| +1.
|
| Someone recently hinted at the opposite angle: Give them a
| lot of money and their motives would move to safeguarding
| their jobs, which results in a higher level of corporate
| politics.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I think this is a great analogy.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| This is why most of the actually meaningful companies are
| "mission driven" (the phrase has been coopted).
|
| That's how you obtain incentive alignment, when you genuinely
| believe that working hard as possible for the company is in
| pursuit of something greater.
|
| This is impossible to do for yet another
| tax/hr/finance/billing startup, and why companies with big
| missions like SpaceX et al have no problem hiring.
| mihaic wrote:
| > Why should they ignore their own self-interest in favor of
| your company's long-term success?
|
| I wasn't expecting them to do something bad for themselves,
| merely to simply do what I was explicitly asking and paying
| them for (and we paid above-market salaries). Too often
| communication was conveniently misinterpreted in obvious bad
| faith to justify them using some expensive AWS feature, or
| simply ignore the core message in the request. This was
| hidden for a lot longer than it should have been since Covid
| forced us to go remote all of a sudden and people would vouch
| for one another.
|
| Honestly, I think now that there simply isn't a way to align
| most employees with you, and that the secret to successful
| start-ups is only going for the easy to execute things, that
| don't rely on the qualities of your employees (or you have
| 100mil raised and your problem is naturally a good challenge
| for them).
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Engineers should always be considering the business impact
| of their decisions, but it's also the job of management to
| create and enforce that culture at every single level. On
| the other hand, it is also suffocating to talented
| engineers to have to try and predict how their bosses would
| do something and emulate that instead of just doing the
| work, and I think this push-pull is where most engineering
| managers fail their employees. Too little control and the
| less engaged/talented engineers will make decisions that
| tank the project, too much micromanagement and velocity
| tanks. With that said, regardless of where engineering
| management sits on the continuum of control, outcomes will
| suffer if managers are just simply bad at engineering and
| making business decisions, which is also often the case.
| alok-g wrote:
| >> ... from employees simply doing what was best for them and
| bad for the company, and most of them not even realizing or
| caring to think about the long-term consequences of their
| actions ...
|
| +1. I see this over and over.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| > employees simply doing what was best for them and bad for the
| company
|
| No surprise there. If you can't align incentives, then you are
| going to have trouble getting people to do what you want.
| Blaming the employees for a company failing is like blaming
| gravity for a building falling.
| codingdave wrote:
| > employees simply doing what was best for them
|
| No leader should expect anything different from their people.
| It is your job to align the incentives so that what is best for
| the employee is to do those things that are best for the
| company. If you are relying on people to do what is not best
| for them out of loyalty to a corporation/startup/vision, you do
| not have an accurate pulse of the modern work force.
|
| And yes, when a leader or company looks like it is going sour,
| sometimes employees act in bad faith for their own self-
| interests. When that happens, question why -- what is it that
| makes them think bad faith actions are more beneficial than
| helping the company. Don't just fire and forget... do some
| self-critique to find out why someone who was smart enough to
| be hired in the first place lost faith in your leadership.
| There are likely important lessons there.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| "We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great
| work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to
| do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying
| them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and
| tell us."
|
| -- Steve Jobs
| ackbar03 wrote:
| How do you guys actually hire the superstars to join your
| startup as the early employees/partners? And not just the
| typical friend you know who's "a pretty smart guy" and his
| friend and so on
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Either they're the founders or friends thereof or you're
| struck-by-lightening lucky.
|
| Realistically tell yourself that 10x developers are a silly
| myth and the people you were able to hire for pennies from
| the local demographic are the superstars, and try not to hang
| your business model on them actually being the best in their
| field. As long as you don't fact check that against reality
| it'll be OK.
| hobs wrote:
| > try not to hang your business model on them actually
| being the best in their field
|
| Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :) You
| probably can't afford the best, you probably don't need the
| best, you probably can't keep the best happy, you
| definitely don't have problems that need the best.
|
| That being said if you pay dollars instead of pennies you
| can find some decent folks and maybe save some money in the
| long run :)
| jll29 wrote:
| > Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :)
| You probably can't afford the best, you probably don't
| need the best, you probably can't keep the best happy,
| you definitely don't have problems that need the best.
|
| You don't need the single best, you just should aspire as
| high a concentration of n * x for n>1 (2x, 10x, ...) as
| your talent to raiase funding permits.
|
| But don't forget it's not all about "best coding"; you
| want people best in _different_ things (PM, UX,
| architecture, security, databases, algorithms, compilers,
| documentation, networking etc. - also depending on what
| the product is about) - a diverse team of rock stars.
| raziel2p wrote:
| maybe the superstar idea is somewhat of an illusion, and they
| are actually just some pretty smart friend of the founder?
| fwip wrote:
| Yep. Friends of the founder also get more political/social
| leverage in the org, so they get more resources to execute
| their ideas, and their results are valued more highly by
| leadership.
| maccard wrote:
| Instead of thinking of them as some superstar, think of it
| like hiring an IC - you want someone who can, and will ship,
| especially in the face of ambiguity. If you hire a mega
| talented engineer who specialises in designing fault tolerant
| distributed systems, you're going to build a fault tolerant
| distributed system. If you hire someone who ships scrappy
| features and doesn't leave a giant mess behind you, you have
| a much better chance of success. Finding those people is the
| same as finding any other developer.
| yunohn wrote:
| I felt like their question was, how to hire them to your
| new startup over them going to or staying at a big corp.
| meiraleal wrote:
| You become friends with pretty smart guys that have the
| potential to become superstars. Which superstar will join a
| wannabe startup?
| breck wrote:
| > actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the
| early employees/partners?
|
| You have to become a superstar first.
|
| I had the good luck of living down the street from the
| AirBedAndBreakfast founders in San Francisco in 2008 and we'd
| commute together to our Tuesday night YC dinners in
| Mountainview.
|
| I picked up early that Nate was already a superstar coder,
| Joe was a superstar designer, and Brian was a superstar
| designer and salesman.
|
| I knew I was not, and had to double down and practice,
| practice, practice.
|
| Craftsmanship comes first. It took those guys decades of
| practice at their crafts before they founded
| AirBedAndBreakfast.
|
| Think of Paul Graham. Before he created HackerNews and YC, he
| had already written and published a book on Lisp! A master
| craftsman.
|
| Craftsmanship comes first.
|
| If you are not a master at your craft, don't even waste your
| time trying to recruit superstars. Instead, spend your time
| on practice.
| detourdog wrote:
| Don't think of people as superstars. Think of them as
| individuals that are able to pay attention and consistently
| meet expectations.
|
| I'm starting to think paying attention to what is happening
| is undervalued.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This only works up to a point, if you lack talent.
|
| AFAIK Florence Foster Jenkins spent her whole life taking
| singing lessons, and this was the result:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ubiUIxbWE
| detourdog wrote:
| I might agree Florence wasn't paying attention.
| kragen wrote:
| 'individuals who consistently meet expectations' is not
| only not the same thing as 'superstars', it's nearly the
| opposite. doing the unexpected is a defining attribute of
| superstars. an individual who consistently meets
| expectations is incapable of simultaneously being a
| superstar. they must exceed them, and to an astounding
| degree, to qualify as a 'superstar' by any normal
| definition of the word
|
| many superstars aren't even good at doing the expected
| when it would be a good idea, often because of drug
| addictions
|
| this happens for two reasons. one is that if you're
| selecting people along two axes, the more harshly you
| select on one axis, the less candidates remain to select
| along the other, unless the axes are perfectly
| correlated. the other is that, whether you're a candidate
| selecting strategies or a judge selecting candidates, two
| axes along which you can select are mean and variance. in
| any event where you take the best of multiple trials, the
| top performers will almost always have high variance, not
| just a high mean
| detourdog wrote:
| The only difference between what you wrote and what I
| wrote is that you removed the first filter and critiqued
| my comment becuase the second filter failed.
|
| The ability to pay attention is where the unexpected
| comes from in my judgement. The whole world looks at
| something and tunes out early because they think they
| understand. An individual that is truly paying attention
| notices all the subtleties that that can be used for a
| fresh solution.
|
| My point is that an inconsistent superstar is not as good
| as an individual with a consistently fresh solution.
|
| Going out one more layer I thought the topic was how to
| have a stable organization with consistently fresh
| thinking. I responded to a topic discussing how to
| attract superstars. I believe anyone has the capability
| of being a superstar in the right environment.
| kragen wrote:
| i mostly agree with your first filter, but your second
| filter excludes all superstars, turning your comment into
| nonsense as a whole
|
| whether 'an inconsistent superstar is not as good as an
| individual with a consistently fresh solution' depends on
| the situation. if you're in a situation where that's
| true, you're not looking for superstars, and you
| shouldn't try to intrude your decision criteria into
| discussions about people who are
|
| > _I believe anyone has the capability of being a
| superstar in the right environment_
|
| that's, i'm sorry, just bullshit. the wrong environment
| can prevent you from being a superstar--imagine if
| madonna had been born before recorded music, or in
| taliban-governed afghanistan--but the reverse is
| obviously false. no environment could have converted me,
| this body, into madonna or messi or jimi hendrix or bruce
| lee or meryl streep or jeff dean. that's pure wishful
| thinking
|
| i don't think the discussion is about how to have a
| stable organization of any kind. it's about how a startup
| can kick ass. to what extent stability promotes that is a
| point under debate, not a premise we have stipulated. i
| can tell you that there is some degree of chaos that
| makes kicking ass impossible, but from experience, it can
| be remarkably high, and stability inevitably trades off
| against chasing superstars. that's because superstars are
| unpredictable by nature--not just when they fail but also
| when they succeed! a new product line that obsoletes
| everything your startup has done so far is a _lot_ of
| instability, and it 's what you are hoping for if you are
| trying to hire superstars in a startup
|
| ignoring that is just self-deception, and trying to
| impose obviously ridiculous redefinitions on the
| conversation in order to cover it up doesn't do the
| discussion any service. if you want to argue that chasing
| superstars is a dumb idea, which is a reasonable point of
| view and correct in many situations, then make that
| argument--don't try to redefine common terms to conceal
| the disagreement
| detourdog wrote:
| I disagree superstars are human one should expect
| failures from humans.
| breck wrote:
| > paying attention to what is happening is undervalued.
|
| Heavily agree. But paying attention to what is happening
| _in nature_.
|
| Pay little attention to what is happening in symbolia.
|
| I got rid of my cell phone 2.5 years ago after my
| daughter kept saying "no phone dadda". Forces me to pay
| attention to nature and real world every moment I'm not
| at my computer. Huge life improvement in every way.
| detourdog wrote:
| Wish I had listened to my 2.5 YO.
| adamesque wrote:
| It really is. People have a hard time balancing focusing
| on their deliverables vs truly paying attention (either
| broadly or deeply). I tend to err toward the attention
| side which makes me a terrible task deliverer, but I
| think on balance paying attention has been more valuable.
| jll29 wrote:
| Indeed, attention and listening is undervalued in the
| mostly male, high-on-ego dev culture.
|
| And it's also easy to speculate in a forum about super
| stars and "10x coders" and what team you should have.
|
| But in reality, you have to play with the cards you have
| been dealt with. You can search for better folks, but
| until you find them, the show must go on.
|
| In many card games, being dealt 8 Aces means losing the
| game, and the same is true for startup teams with all-
| alpha animal "leaders" who are all super smart but cannot
| agree on anything.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| It's easy. They all happen to live in SF and be working on a
| YC start-up...
|
| /s
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| How many startups actually need superstars? Most of them are
| doing glorified CRUD work. There's nothing wrong with that!
|
| But companies should be honest with themselves about what
| they need. Everyone still seems obsessed with being able to
| pretend they somehow got the absolute best deal on the
| employment market instead of interviewing for the position
| itself.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| But then you hear about stories of employees coming to Steve's
| office to give a presentation about how such and such
| technology isn't possible, then Steve says yes it is figure it
| out, and they do.
| atulatul wrote:
| "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!"
|
| https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
| spencerchubb wrote:
| That's a case of an employee telling what _not_ to do
| Aurornis wrote:
| The problem with Steve Jobs advice like this is that it doesn't
| work out of context.
|
| I worked for a VP and CTO who embraced this advice literally:
| They wanted to hire smart people and have them decide what
| would be done. They took it to so much of an extreme that they
| washed their hands of the responsibility for deciding and
| executing anything. Their job, they thought, was to call us to
| meetings and then ask a lot of questions about what we were
| going to do.
|
| The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the
| organizational authority to actually get important things done.
| We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to
| actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from
| other departments about the important cross-organizational
| factors of getting software implemented and adopted.
|
| Instead, it was never-ending circles of Socratic method
| questions: What do you need to succeed? How will your team
| accomplish that? Who can you talk to make that happen? Whenever
| we tried to make it clear that we needed _them_ to do some work
| in the organization, we got a lecture about learning how to be
| self sufficient and get things done ourselves.
|
| Not surprisingly, little got done. We wrote the software fine,
| but any time we encountered issues that required VP or C-level
| collaboration we hit a wall. You can only defer to IC employees
| to tell you what to do for so long. Beyond that point it's just
| laziness.
|
| This is also a stark contrast to how Steve Jobs actually
| operated, which by all accounts was extremely demanding,
| dismissive, and command-and-control with him at the center.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Great comment, curious to hear more about your perspective.
|
| > The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the
| organizational authority to actually get important things
| done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and
| CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get
| agreement from other departments about the important cross-
| organizational factors of getting software implemented and
| adopted.
|
| Would it be fair to diagnose this as an issue where the tech
| side of the business ran in an open, proactive way but
| _other_ departments had a top-down mentality that required
| interfacing with the head of your department?
|
| In other words - do you think it is a necessary/desirable
| feature that ICs need organizational authority from the CTO
| to push major changes? I get that _given_ how the rest of the
| org functioned, it would have been much better to have more
| top-down mentality from the CTO. But is there a better
| equilibrium where this is not required?
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| The reality is that no matter how much you decide to push
| authority down, at some point there will be conflicting
| decisions and you need to resolve that. Most organizations
| lean escalation upwards eventually to the CEO to resolve
| disputes.
|
| If tech is trying to make changes that impact another major
| business area, and chaos needs to be avoided, then if you
| want to avoid executives being involved then members of
| that org need to be empowered to agree on those changes.
| However if you do that without structure it's easy to just
| end up with organizational chaos as you wind up massively
| multiplying the communication channels that need to be
| pushed lower in the org. Someone needs to limit and direct
| the people responsible for those decisions if they're not
| going to make them themselves.
| swalsh wrote:
| There's a few Steve Jobs quotes which have tanked the tech
| industry. The quote "If I'd ask customers what they wanted,
| they would've told me a faster horse." for example is
| absolutely horrible advice for 90% of companies. It implies
| you understand your customers business better than they do.
| For simple B2C businesses, that might be true. For complex
| B2B businesses, it's very likely not true. If your founder
| spent decades doing the job of his customers, and (s)he know
| a better way to do it using new tech, it JUST might be true.
| Rarely is that the case though.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I know it's not your main point and you may already know
| this, but that's usually attributed as a Henry Ford quote,
| not Steve Jobs. From context, you seemingly imply its Jobs'
| quote, without specifically attributing it to him.
|
| But in researching this, it's all pretty ambiguous but a
| decently relevant HBR article came out of it:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150209203853/https://hbr.org/
| 2...
| maayank wrote:
| I like to say "you can't delegate vision"
| jayd16 wrote:
| Delegation is great but you need to win the culture war. You
| need alignment, and passion for the same goals or else it
| doesn't matter how good the people are.
| gist wrote:
| Wonderful but almost all startups don't have a cultural icon
| (and btw he was one way back after Apple got started and
| obviously when he returned) nor do they have the resources to
| 'hire great people' and fire anyone and replace them.
| aforty wrote:
| I guess what this blog post is about is that it only works if
| you have the ability to instinctively tell who those people
| are. Steve did and I know a few other people personally who do
| but I sure as hell don't.
| heisenbit wrote:
| I struggle to see this different from the manager vs. leadership
| discussion. Founders need to give direction and shape where the
| company is going. This is not new e.g. the situational leadership
| model advices a more directive style during the initial phase and
| even competent, experienced newcomers to a team start at low
| performance and require help.
|
| One systemic problem in the more mature parts of the industry
| seems to me the layering of management over leadership. Maybe one
| needs more of the former than the latter but without the latter
| in each layer it is impossible to turn a larger ship on a new
| course or adjust speed.
| frankdejonge wrote:
| Saying "hire good people and give them room to do good work" is
| bad advice is the same as judging a dish while using half a
| recipe. It's execution centric and execution alone is never
| enough, you need direction. A strategy, a vision, a need. Without
| a need from a customer it's nothing.
| dartharva wrote:
| Reminds me of this:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1eu574f/got_fu...
| inSenCite wrote:
| Nice conclusions but remarkably devoid of any useful advice
| Chance-Device wrote:
| When a company is successful, by which I mean it turns a healthy
| profit and eventually even enough to go public, it ends up
| sustaining a lot more employees doing a lot less than a smaller,
| leaner company that can't afford inefficiency.
|
| That doesn't matter much to the successful company, it makes more
| than enough money to cover the inefficiency, and the inefficiency
| isn't causing any real trouble - it just means that a lot of
| people are being paid either to not produce very much or to
| produce things that will end up being thrown away.
|
| Most executives and high level managers are used to this
| environment. You don't actually need to be lean or very
| effective, you just need to pretend to be and know that whatever
| the company's main revenue source is will cover you whatever you
| do. As long as you can tell a good story internally to justify
| your position.
|
| Turns out that doesn't transfer well to startups that actually
| need value out of every dollar spent.
| richardw wrote:
| Yeah but when your company gets a real challenge, you find out
| if you're filled with builders or comp optimisers.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| A really special failure mode is to hire management from proper
| grown up companies to implement real processes for your
| aspirationally-real startup. Serious economic misunderstanding
| on multiple levels and a popular choice nevertheless.
| hobs wrote:
| Hah! I have seen and cleaned this up several times now; spend
| 80% or more of the total lifetime spend of the company in say
| year 4-6 after you got some basic traction, borrowing like
| crazy, gain literally nothing, fire everyone involved, start
| over with skeleton team, rebuild something useful out of the
| ashes.
| Aurornis wrote:
| My first exposure to big company management was, ironically,
| at a startup. They hired their C-level executives from big
| companies. Those executives hired VPs and extra layers of
| management who were also from big companies. Very quickly we
| had a deep org chart where ICs could be 5 steps removed from
| the CEO even though they hadn't decided exactly what product
| we were going to build.
|
| Everything was done by committee in increments of the 1-hour
| recurring meeting once a week. You could be on 10 of these
| recurring meetings for 10 different projects.
|
| The first part of every meeting was a recap of last meeting.
| The middle part was about 20 minutes of trying to make
| progress on blocking items while the ex-BigCo managers came
| up with excuses for why they didn't do their part yet
| (usually it was because they had too many meetings). The last
| 20 minutes was a performative exercise where we decided on
| action items for the week which we all knew were unlikely to
| get done.
|
| The company went on like this for years after I left until
| they ran out of extra funds to keep the charade going. The
| management scattered to other "startups" where I've heard
| they're continuing to repeat the same games.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Honestly, the people that put in these processes are the
| smart ones. Useless as they are, they do climb the ladder,
| get good titles, and good pay.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Honestly, the people that put in these processes are
| the smart ones.
|
| These people are not the smart ones, but the ones who are
| really good at doing "company politics" and "playing
| political games" (which are very different skills from
| being smart).
|
| My personal opinion is that it is rather a sign of
| smartness to see through all of this. But unluckily the
| people who _are_ capable of this lack the political power
| and backing of other people to get "dangerous" for these
| "ladder climbers" (or if they do become dangerous, it is
| for the same reasons easy to "get rid of them" (e.g. fire
| them)).
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Smart? I doubt they like doing those things.
|
| If they were actually smart they'd figure out how to set
| up an employment situation that they don't mind that also
| has the pay/status that they want.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| You're right. People here will deny it, but who is
| smarter: someone who attends cushy meetings all week and
| gets paid millions, or someone who burns themselves out
| hacking away at code 80 hours a week making $200k a year?
|
| Congrats, you are very smart and know how to manipulate
| symbols real good. Try cashing that check at the bank.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| This so much. The hacking and coding doesnt matter,
| nobody really needs a 10x engineer. Well capitalized
| startups can just go hire 5 more engineers if they need
| to. I wish when i was younger i could have just accepted
| this
| fluorinerocket wrote:
| This sounds like my last company.
|
| Was it a new space startup in the Bay area?
| ozim wrote:
| I miss ,,ta-ba-dum-tss" at the end of the story. Yeah they
| all played us for fools as they don't have to do any real
| work and I also seen such folks here and there hired for
| friends startup...
| jll29 wrote:
| The mangagement structure always must reflect the size and
| the phase(!) of the startup itself.
|
| What you describe sounds like a "founders just came
| together" trying to impersonate the IBM org chart without
| having figured out product-market fit yet, or even earlier
| than that.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Conversly, I have seen a fair number of start-ups creating very
| inefficient setups and processes - having some knowledge on how
| to do things effectively and efficiently is something that
| needs to be acquired.
| jodacola wrote:
| I've had a lot of conversations over my career about this
| general topic, and I still haven't been able to answer:
|
| If a large, successful company operated extremely cleanly,
| wouldn't that increase stock price even further?
|
| What are the disincentives to doing so (beyond the need for
| requiring more from people)?
| throwadobe wrote:
| It takes effort, requires goodwill, has damaging implications
| to internal politics and ultimately is not the best way to
| maximize tenure at C-level roles.
|
| Executives are solving for their job, not for the company's
| success.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Once a company becomes successful, it attracts the second
| kind of people in Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
|
| https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Third, there's people who only value themselves and use the
| organization as an excuse.
| Chance-Device wrote:
| I'd add to the other replies by saying that this isn't just
| pure inefficiency - it's the ability to try things and get
| them wrong without dying. Often several things. If one of
| them works out, maybe they justify the rest - just like
| investing in startups, ironically.
|
| Second, it's also about redundancy, having more employees
| covers you from key man syndrome where your operations could
| be adversely affected by an employee leaving. Even if it
| means you technically have more employees than you need at a
| bare minimum.
|
| Third, I'd argue that the level of "efficiency" required by a
| startup simply isn't sustainable in the long run, unless you
| want everyone to burn out. Successful companies likely span a
| spectrum of efficiency, but none of them _need_ to be on the
| far efficient end like startups do, and that's better for
| everyone working there.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| An upper-level employee wants many employees under them. Then
| they can argue for a higher salary and have a good line on
| their resume.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Maintaining a good structure is a cost on its own. A good
| analogy is how most many engineers think "if I spend two days
| writing documentation then I'll save one hour figuring out
| things later, resulting in net gain of negative fifteen work
| hours, great job".
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > What are the disincentives to doing so (beyond the need for
| requiring more from people)?
|
| Working out how to motivate people whose individual impact
| now has near zero impact on the stock price.
| sbussard wrote:
| When I first joined the corporate world, I finished some tasks
| for my team and immediately went to other teams to ask if they
| needed help with anything. Astonishingly, this was met with
| backlash. This was at a heavily culture driven company with a
| core value of "self employed mentality" and "breaking down
| silos". I don't blame my manager, it probably made him look bad
| in that environment. The corporate world has done its darnedest
| to beat the founder out of me.
| getnormality wrote:
| Yeah, this is common. The cartoon version is:
|
| 1. Company: follow this cultural principle that has become
| high-status because some successful people and organizations
| have done it recently.
|
| 2. You: okay, I've genuinely internalized this principle and
| applied it to my situation and here are the results.
|
| 3. Your manager: not like that!
| DannyBee wrote:
| The larger the company the more inconsistent the experience is
| because nobody is really truly held accountable to culture when
| they can (pretend) to produce business results. Even places
| that theoretically want to care usually just put it lower on
| the priority list and end up not caring by default.
|
| I was promoted 7 times at Google to VP for basically doing what
| you write in the first sentence (at scale). Then I meet people
| who were laid off and felt they operated the same way.
|
| The main difference seems to be I worked in areas that
| literally couldn't afford to have the kind of managers and
| leaders that would ding people (vs support people) for doing
| this, so they didn't. The other folks worked in areas that made
| enough money that the culture could afford to be shitty, and it
| would take a long time to matter. So it was.
|
| my experience is that eventually the company circumstances
| change which requires different cultures to operate differently
| to still be successful. Either they do or the company dies.
|
| PG mostly seems to be suggesting that we should try hard to
| avoid the shitty cultures in the first place rather than accept
| it as an artifact of scale. I'm not sure I believe that's
| possible past a certain size but I do think it's interesting to
| try. But for now, I mostly come down on the side of build
| smaller companies that are worth more.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered
| the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the
| 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of
| will it would take to do this at the average company? [...] Steve
| presumably wouldn't have kept having these retreats if they
| didn't work.
|
| Probably, but before we assume that Steve's management style was
| unabashedly good at scaling... well, it reminded me of this story
| from a former Apple employee:
|
| https://techreflect.org/2019/05/horsey/
|
| ---
|
| _There used to be a weekly meeting with Steve Jobs to go over
| user interfaces and workflows for macOS [...] with the higher ups
| [...] After this meeting, there would be a "debriefing" where one
| or more of the attendees of that meeting would report to the
| underlings. Sometimes that included people like me. [...] What
| was fun about these debriefings is that they were like a game of
| telephone._
|
| _1. Steve might say something in the weekly meeting_
|
| _2. Someone would jot down what they think he said_
|
| _3. The notes might get passed to someone else who would go to
| the debriefing_
|
| _4. Someone in the debriefing would relay their version of what
| was written down_
|
| _The debriefing was a meeting often consisting of puzzled
| looks._
|
| _One time an icon change was being proposed. The note we got in
| the debriefing was that Steve said it was "horsey", which
| prompted endless discussion:_
|
| _* What does horsey mean?_
|
| _* Is horsey good or bad?_
|
| _* How do we make something less or more horsey?_
|
| _* Is the horsey-ness something minor that needs tweaking or so
| major that it needs to be redone?_
|
| _* Did anyone just ask Steve what the hell he meant?_
|
| _[...] People would sometimes present the same content [to Steve
| at next week 's meeting] and Steve would magically "change his
| mind" but I often wondered whether [...] what appeared to be a
| change of mind was just a message that was garbled in the first
| place._
|
| _There was definitely an element of control as well. Some of the
| higher ups who had closer access to Steve wanted to exercise more
| control than perhaps they had. For example, the horsey comment
| could be tweaked to fit a change someone below Steve felt needed
| to be made. Since not everyone had speed dial access to Steve, it
| was easy to take advantage of any ambiguity._
| Kydlaw wrote:
| I wasn't expecting Elon Musk as a proofreader for PG's essays. To
| me that's interesting just by itself.
|
| That might be personal bias, but I think the idea that PG is
| developing here already stem a lot in the Agile movement (not the
| software one, the general one). The problem is that, as PG
| mention, there is probably not one founder mode, but more like a
| set of them. This makes their academic description harder to
| conceive.
| richardw wrote:
| Checks out from this old account of a BillG review:
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
| breck wrote:
| > "Skip-level" meetings will become the norm instead of a
| practice so unusual that there's a name for it.
|
| Elon put this great, in 2018:
|
| > Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to
| get the job done, not through the "chain of command." Any manager
| who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon
| find themselves working elsewhere.
| sneak wrote:
| > _For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what
| he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these
| were not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine
| the force of will it would take to do this at the average
| company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It
| could make a big company feel like a startup._
|
| Can you imagine being the 101st to 110th most important and not
| getting an invite, while people with lower rank do?
|
| I suspect the value of such a tradition is only able to be
| captured in very large organizations, otherwise it's just a
| morale-destroying exercise for 80%.
| cb321 wrote:
| This article could be said to be a discussion of the "start-up
| business" realization / concretization of generic problems in
| human societies which are also themselves instances of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module /
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_design /
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_analysis and "imperfect
| abstraction" problems (like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction).
|
| This general problem has so very many guises! Delegation affords
| so much, but trust sure is tricky. (This even applies recursively
| to, say, taking advice from anyone who "seems to" have studied
| all there is to know about abstraction/modularity or "human
| delegation optimization" which is, basically,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem.) It may be the
| single most central problem of the human condition and is
| probably a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem .
|
| More directly related to the article, one main impediment is that
| humans are sneaky & tricky enough that if fakery is incentivized
| (it almost always is -- due to the thermodynamics of doing vs.
| faking), then this informs the viability of whatever Rules /
| protocols you try to establish.
| https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch does
| a better job at extending the conversation than I ever could in
| an HN comment.
| prasoonds wrote:
| Here's an audio version if anyone prefers listening instead
|
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DLtJAShDN54ooPWpBspHPV98rh2...
| ajb wrote:
| There are three different kinds of environment:
|
| - Startup. Doesn't know how to make money yet, or if it does, is
| still learning how to execute its vision. It's essential to have
| a small team of maximally competent people, so recruitment is
| cautious. Employees are pets, not cattle. Projects are executed
| in time linear in the man-hours required
|
| - Scale-up. Has found an opportunity so big that it needs to
| occupy it as fast as possible, before the competition does.
| Recruitment has to take risks. Large critical projects are
| executed in time proportional to the square root of the man-hours
| required[1].
|
| - Established business. Has big battalions, but does not grow
| them very quickly. concentrates on not losing its market
| position. Recruitment optimizes for fungibility. Projects are
| executed in time linear in the man-hours required.
|
| Each of these requires a different skill set from leadership.
|
| [1] McConnell, "Software estimation - Demystifying the black art"
| gregwebs wrote:
| What struck me from reading Elon Musk's (he proofread this essay)
| biography is that he would do things that you could obviously
| hire someone else to do. For example, to make the Tesla car line
| more productive. His heavy involvement seems to be a way to
| create decisiveness and quickly iterate. if something goes wrong,
| the blame is on him, and he's the founder and chief executive.
| Whereas if an employee attempted to do some of these things they
| might have to write up a detailed report and rationale and
| possibly even conduct studies. in probably less time than someone
| would normally finish their studies and report (let alone make
| any changes) Musk had iterated to tripling the throughput of the
| Tesla factory.
|
| Musk as a founder-like role (he wasn't actually a founder) has
| the incentives to make this happen. in this case, he had a
| specific milestone to reach to get a very lucrative bonus. at the
| same time, he had a lot of stock and would not want to do
| anything that would damage the long-term prospects of the
| company. Whereas an executive might go after a bonus without
| worrying about long-term negative effects. Even if an executive
| has stock options, they might not vest and even though they are
| an executive, the founder and others are creating the fate of the
| company and the value of the options, not just them.
| neom wrote:
| This is conventional wisdom.
|
| https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-differ...
|
| https://hbr.org/2016/06/do-managers-and-leaders-really-do-di...
|
| https://hbr.org/2022/09/the-best-managers-are-leaders-and-vi...
|
| Almost every HBR "Must Read" series on enterprise management says
| the same thing as this blog post. The business world has been
| talking about this stuff since the 90s.
| richrichie wrote:
| Synthesizing conventional wisdom into readable blog posts is
| Paul Graham's specialty though. It clearly has a market.
| neom wrote:
| Well the blog post said that some other wisdom was
| conventional wisdom, I'm not sure what the conventional
| wisdom he was pointing to is, I was just saying, people have
| known how to build, grow and manage enterprises for a little
| while now, I'm not sure why Ron Conway was so flabbergasted.
| Maybe he didn't make notes because he'd read some Patrick
| Lencioni. ;)
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Was it conventional wisdom when he published an article
| suggesting that lisp knowledge would have prevented 9/11
| hijackers from succeeding?
|
| It's so conventional that he de-listed the article but keeps
| it published and available by URL
| kragen wrote:
| what's the url? usually pg thinks lisp knowledge makes
| people more likely to succeed, not less
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| https://paulgraham.com/hijack.html
|
| > By promoting themselves from data to code, hijackers on
| September 11th promoted box-cutters into 400,000 lb.
| incendiary bombs
|
| Published September 2001
| kragen wrote:
| aha, this is awesome! and indeed the solution he suggests
| (locking the cockpit door) is the only one of the various
| security measures put in place to prevent a recurrence
| that is generally agreed to have been effective rather
| than just security theater
|
| i want to give pg a lot of credit for clear thinking
| here, but of course if he'd suggested locking cockpit
| doors in august 02001 instead of september, that would
| have been significantly more impressive
|
| your original summary of
| https://paulgraham.com/hijack.html was not correct
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Thanks for explaining my link back to me
| kragen wrote:
| sure, i hope it helped you understand it. thanks for the
| link! i don't remember if i read it at the time or not
| kazinator wrote:
| That doesn't say anything like that Lisp knowledge could
| have prevented the attacks. It does say that reasoning
| similar to reasoning about computer systems security
| could have led to better aircraft security.
|
| The code/data rhetoric is not exclusively an earmark of
| Lisp. A primary concern in security are situations in
| which what is intended to be data allows for a surprising
| malicious use whereby it effectively becomes a way to
| program behaviors into the software which processes the
| data.
|
| For instance, Winamp being exploited by loading a
| specially crafted MP3 playlist file is an instance of
| data becoming code; no Lisp in sight. Code being a
| flipside of data, in the context of security, is simply
| the consequence of the Von Neumann model.
|
| Graham is arguing for compartments; exactly why we use
| containers and such. The main idea is that the passenger
| cabin should be sandboxed away from the cockpit, which
| isn't earth-shattering.
|
| Where he mentions Lisp is this:
|
| _> The defense that does work is to keep code and data
| in separate places. Then there is no way to compromise
| code by playing tricks with data. Garbage-collected
| languages like Perl and Lisp do this, and as a result are
| immune from buffer overflow attacks._
|
| This point seems bungled. Garbage collection is no
| panacea. Bugs in a garbage collected run-time can expose
| applications to exploitable attacks. The advantage in
| Perl and Lisp is that the application programmer is not
| writing low-level buffer manipulation routines from
| scratch. That stuff is in the language run time, where we
| debug the low-level implementation code once, and have
| thousands of applications use the debugged thing. If a
| hole is found, we fix it once, and close the issue in
| thousands of apps once they upgrade to the new run-time.
|
| Garbage collected languages do not necessarily keep code
| and data in separate places. Moreover, non-garbage-
| collected languages do that. The C language can easily be
| implemented in a conforming manner such that the data
| areas (automatic storage (a.k.a. stack) and dynamic
| (malloc) are not executable. C keeps code and data
| separate. Functions are not objects. In some C
| implementations, like certain DSP chips, functions are in
| a separate space; you cannot cast a function pointer to
| char * and access the function image, because the
| resulting pointer will be interpreted in a different
| memory area. Of course, C data can contain pointers to
| functions, which can be redirected if overwritten.
|
| Lisp data can also contain function pointers: e.g. a
| closure object with a pointer to code and to an
| environment. If that is stored in a heap somewhere where
| an array is also stored, and the run-time has a bug which
| allows array overrun, it could perhaps be exploited.
| getnormality wrote:
| I carefully reviewed all three of these articles. While it's
| possible that I still missed something, I did not find any
| material that aligns with the unique point of Paul's post.
| Nothing that says leaders may have to directly engage with
| employees underneath their direct reports to understand what is
| actually going on in the company.
|
| It is perhaps possible to interpret these articles as saying
| anything whatsoever, but they don't seem to _specifically_ say
| what Paul 's article says.
| giarc wrote:
| But even PG goes back on that by saying "Obviously founders
| can't keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it
| when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount of
| delegation." So what he is saying is managers should talk to
| their reports. He writes like this is some groundbreaking
| realization, but to me I'm not even sure what he's getting
| at. For example he pushes back against the idea of hiring and
| letting them do work, but then says don't micromanage them,
| so which is it?
| cal85 wrote:
| When he says "That would be micromanaging them, which is
| bad" he is describing the traditional view. He continues,
| "Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.
| Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it?
| Except in practice..."
| ta988 wrote:
| There is a balance between letting people run free, and
| controlling every tiny decisions. You have to keep the
| direction and vision, and you have to make sure everyone is
| going toward that. But you shouldn't trust they will do it
| by themselves (they may not have internalized it as much as
| you do either) and you shouldn't trust your ability to deal
| with every detail of the complex system you are trying to
| build. If you hired specialists that's also because you
| were lacking some abilities, not just because you want
| extensions of yourself by lack of time. And if you hired
| generalists that's because you needed glue to make the
| whole operation work with a level of understanding that you
| can't allocate your time to, and because you may lack the
| variety of skills that allow for efficient communication
| with the specialists.
|
| As with any complex system, you have to be careful about
| degrees of freedom, too many and it can break down and too
| little and it can get seized.
| neom wrote:
| Maybe I misinterpreted Pauls blog post, but what i got was:
| Mangers != Leaders, Leaders != Managers. Management and
| Leadership need to be well understood in any organization.
| Good Mangers can be good leaders. The CEO is often the
| manager of the leadership. This is effectively what they
| teach in the Harvard MBA.
| tinco wrote:
| Yeah I think you did. You can't just switch founder for
| leader. A great leader would inspire the organization to
| work productively and effectively, but that's not what
| distinguishes the founder. The founder would make sure the
| organization is actually working on the most effective
| thing, and I think what Paul tries to convey is that one of
| the tools the founder uses to accomplish this is crossing
| the organizational tree (i.e. skip-level meetings).
|
| I think the founder not only motivates people to work on
| the correct thing by doing this, but the founder also
| directly experiences feedback from working with people
| lower on the org chart, enabling them to steer the company
| with more accurate information.
| neom wrote:
| But what scale are we talking about? I've scaled from
| zero to IPO a couple of times, I've never seen past a few
| k people, airbnb is at 38,000. The only real world stuff
| I know to get about leadership and management at 38,000
| people is learnings from harvard. I thought Brian was
| saying he manages his leadership team tightly, not that
| he spends a lot of time with ICs? I think that's
| conventional advice, manage your leadership team well?
| What is skip level at this scale? CEO going to sr.
| director level? I don't mind having lunch with a VP but I
| can't imagine doing work with them from the C level?
|
| To my mind the CEO job at scale is 4 things - Keeping the
| fight fair-- The leadership and executive management
| should argue viciously, The CEO should make sure these
| conflicts remain constructive and aligned with company
| goals
|
| Holding the vision true-- There's a risk of mission
| drift, continually reinforce and refine the company's
| vision, make sure all leaders remain aligned with
| longterm goals
|
| Enforcing strategic adherence-- A strategy is only as
| good as its execution. ensure the leadership team not
| only understands the strategy but implements it across
| all levels of the organization. Manager of Leaders
|
| Deal with the real world-- Q-calls, investor relations,
| supply chains/vendors/etc.
|
| This is often the problem I have with business advice,
| it's general but not generally applicable. Scale matters
| probably most in the context, followed by the type of
| business.
| tinco wrote:
| Okay, I've only scaled to 30 people so far, so anything I
| say is just me interpreting things I read.
|
| I imagine from what I read about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk
| and Jensen Huang is that all three of them have/had
| unconventional management style in the sense that they're
| often amongst the IC's. Obviously you can't do that with
| all of your 30.000 employees, but I think they're just
| picking the teams that are most crucial at a certain
| point.
|
| For example if Steve Jobs is managing Apple while
| launching the iPhone, I imagine he's talking to the VP of
| Sales in the management meetings, but he's not on the
| sales floor, nor is he sitting with MacOS dev teams or
| making sure motivations are high in the customer service
| department. But I bet you could find him in weekly iPhone
| design team meetings, and maybe he'd be shown progress on
| iOS every month and have a 3-hour brainstorm with a core
| team of senior devs on that team. Maybe they'd pull him
| into procurement meetings to make sure the capacitative
| touch screens would be made in the quantity they needed.
|
| You'd have your VP's, directors and senior management
| making sure the ship sails, but you'd have the founder
| CEO present where they can have most impact, which just
| isn't in those top level meetings.
| neom wrote:
| "Their partnership began when Jobs appointed Ive as
| Apple's senior vice president of industrial design in
| 1997. Ive described their daily routine, saying, "We
| worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch
| together most days and spent our afternoons in the
| sanctuary of the design studio."
|
| http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/111457691.
| cms...
|
| This is a great talk by Brian on why he is CEO, he has a
| bit of a chip on his shoulder about designers not being
| CEOs from what I gathered:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6h_EDcj12k
| jppope wrote:
| No, PG knows what a "leader" is and knows how to choose his
| words. He is identifying the difference between
| professional managers and founders in the context of
| running an org
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| There's been many news stories, business articles, and
| studies suggesting that. I don't know how popular they are in
| management literature. I just know many stayed promoting this
| with high resistance from big business, management people,
| etc.
|
| At the least, they said you need to hear directly from the
| people on the ground to know what they're experiencing. The
| people on top could talk to them about what they learned.
|
| Additionally, companies like IBM and FedEx used to give
| rewards to employees for ideas to improve the company. It was
| often a percentage of what those ideas made or saved up to a
| certain cap. A bunch of people would usually collect the max
| reward whenever this way implemented.
|
| Those are a few examples that I saw show up in many places.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _This is conventional wisdom._
|
| I'm not sure it is.
|
| Let's look at those three links:
|
| 1. The first of these dovetails -- not the same, but on the
| same hunt -- with Graham's piece, and is an _excellent_ read.
|
| - _Unconventional_ wisdom
|
| 2. The second is formulaic anecdata consultjunk, the same
| method incurious journalists use covering politics through
| "focus groups".
|
| - _Conventional_ wisdom
|
| 3. The third uses the same formula, and while more effort
| (think "polling" or "survey" instead of "focus group") in an
| attempt to elevate from anecdata to study, seems not to have
| read or understood the first.
|
| This third one is also contrary to the (often rejected while
| not yet disproven) theories* of Elliot Jacques, that people
| have sweet spot time horizons, and most can only flex +/- 2
| horizons. As this article bullet lists (because of course) how
| to "shift from a leader/manager mindset to a lead/manage one
| and balance the two skillsets" it applies solely the manager
| rubric to action, through the lens of a manager that doesn't
| understand Graham's piece or the first article, almost
| irreconcilable with Graham's stance or the first HBR piece.
|
| - _Conventional_ wisdom (orthodoxy, even)
|
| PG article and first link are not _conventional_ wisdom, though
| it might sound that way to Taylorist thinking.
|
| - - -
|
| Perhaps the lack of awareness Graham keeps noting is to be
| expected.
|
| Seems unusual for serial startup entrepreneurs who have built
| firms from $0 to $B to have also individually joined and worked
| up to C-level in "institutions" (50+ years old, and 5K - 100K+
| employees, not just other tech unicorns still bearing Founder
| imprints) _after_ learning the startup experience that lets
| them see management practice through a "it doesn't have to be
| like this" lens, making it rare to find the perspective
| necessary to delve into Graham's take or the difference between
| these three HBR articles.
|
| Perhaps it's not only that management culture is a distorted
| bubble (PG: _" VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't
| know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a
| class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world"_).
|
| Perhaps it's that founders with institutional perspective are
| themselves unicorns.
|
| ---
|
| Footnote:
|
| * Elliott Jaques' _" Stratified Systems Theory of Requisite
| Organization"_ suggests that individuals have a natural "sweet
| spot" time horizon for decision-making at work (which should
| align with the time horizon of the decisions' scope and
| impact), and most can only communicate up or manage down within
| a range of one or two levels above or below their own optimal
| horizon. --
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requisite_organization
| mrandish wrote:
| > Seems unusual for serial startup entrepreneurs who have
| built firms from $0 to $B to have also individually joined
| and worked up to C-level in "institutions" (50+ years old,
| and 5K - 100K+ employees, not just other tech unicorns still
| bearing Founder imprints) after learning the startup
| experience that lets them see management practice through a
| "it doesn't have to be like this" lens
|
| Both PG's post and your point about his experience creating a
| rare perspective are spot on. While I think PG's "Founder
| Mode" concept needs further exploration, he's on to something
| I never saw in the typical HBR-type literature. It mirrors my
| experience being a startup founder acquired into a decades-
| old F500 tech company.
|
| As a senior executive it took me quite a while to figure out
| how this huge, well run company really worked and I always
| felt my understanding of the important ways it was different
| from my startup were unique and distinct from the standard
| business writing. I hope this Founder Mode distinction is
| developed further because there really is something new and
| valuable here. As you've pointed out, the problem is only a
| few hundred people have experienced the journey from
| successful tech startup founder to senior exec inside a
| decades-old, >5K employee global tech giant.
|
| For me it was profoundly eye-opening while being both
| fascinating and alienating. Once inside the giant, I saw many
| things not working (of course), but I also saw other things
| which definitely _seemed_ to kind of work but in entirely
| 'upside-down' ways from my prior experience. It's like the
| systems (and ways of thinking behind them) had evolved
| differently in an alternate universe. They were much more
| complex, less efficient and strangely opaque. But these
| bizarre constructions did scale and were (mostly) working,
| while being unpredictably unreliable in mysterious ways. When
| asked to run them, or worse, improve/fix them I found myself
| completely lost due to their alien anatomy. I couldn't fix
| them because, to me, they were "not even wrong". Yet to
| everyone around me, they just seemed normal.
|
| Systems like this were the source of that simultaneous
| fascination and alienation. It caused me to question my core
| premises about 'how things work', which I'd formed over
| decades of experience across three successful startups,
| evoking feelings similar to PG's reference gas lighting. This
| experience repeated itself several times and the profound
| feeling of alien "otherness" is the strangest thing I ever
| experienced in business. Even now, I find it difficult to
| convey a true sense of. And it's the one thing I've never
| come across anyone talking about until PG's Founder Mode.
|
| To be clear, I'm not talking about the usual nonsensical org
| chart stuff one finds in lurking in most big orgs. This is
| about the deeper structures and dynamics that make complex
| processes fundamentally work in balanced, self-correcting
| ways. What I've always called "The right people, in the right
| process, with the right feedbacks." Echoing PG's post, in my
| experience, these essential structures can only be fully
| understood vertically across levels from high to low. And
| across degrees of granularity from the macro to the micro. As
| a founder in my startup, instantly jumping between these
| scales while building or fixing such a system, is when I'd
| often hear push back from employees or even board members who
| came from traditional business backgrounds. While obvious to
| me, they just didn't seem able to see how these disparate
| things were connected in a deeper, crucially important way.
| Perhaps being able to see things in this dimension and
| determine which are essential to the business, is a key part
| of Founder Mode.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _the deeper structures and dynamics that make complex
| processes fundamentally work in balanced, self-correcting
| ways ... only fully understood across levels_
|
| I'd be very interested to compare notes. I'm username at
| alphabet's service.
| paulsutter wrote:
| The article says exactly the opposite. The central point is
| that a founder runs a company differently from a "professional
| manager"
|
| > There are as far as I know no books specifically about
| founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists.
|
| > ...what they were being told was how to run a company you
| hadn't founded -- how to run a company if you're merely a
| professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective
| that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can
| do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to
| founders, because it is.
| sarbak wrote:
| Leader and founder is not the same thing.
|
| I think the key difference is that a founder has a much better
| understanding of the company as a complex system. This
| understanding includes not just how people think it works at a
| certain point. It includes all the previous attempts, reasoning
| behind those attemps, the context of past failures and
| successes, the personal dynamics behind those choices.
|
| Complex systems are notoriously hard to understand. Seeing the
| system develop from zero to complexity is an experience and
| perspective that is impossible to replace. Even most early
| employees don't have a comparable understanding.
|
| Of course not all founders know everything about all the key
| components of their businesses, but the founding team does have
| a much much better understanding than other person. I think
| that's why founders get frustrated with ineffective things.
| While most others have to account for unknown unknowns and give
| others benefit of doubt, the founders have a much better and
| robust understanding of why things happen the way they happen.
|
| The difference between management and leadership may be more
| about where you focus and how you engage others. Being a
| founder and being a leader is different in how well you
| understand the system.
| neom wrote:
| I think there is an interesting question in: should more
| founders be public market CEOs leading their vision? That is
| a super interesting question imo. We had a lot of discussion
| about this at DigitalOcean pre ipo, it's the main reason I
| left, and after I left the CEO was still my best friend and
| after a lot of conversation, he didn't feel like public
| market exec sounded that interesting either, the whole
| founding leadership team switched over. I'm not sure about
| the other guys, but a couple of us basically said "we're
| founders not public market execs" and bowed out. I say kudos
| to Brian, Jeff Lawson, Matthew Prince etc for doing both,
| because I've heard that the job in the public markets can get
| brutal.
|
| https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stock-screener/founder-led-
| com...
| whymauri wrote:
| Anyone can be a founder.
|
| Not everyone can be a leader.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Not everyone can be a founder.
|
| But in my experience a good founder doesn't necessarily
| make a good leader. Not a CEO anyway, but it depends on the
| role of the CEO. If the the CEO is "chief strategy and
| opportunity officer" then some founders are often quite
| well suited to it.
|
| But we should bear in mind that all founders do not have
| the same skill set. Woz was also a founder of Apple and a
| great engineer but not a CEO.
| zachthewf wrote:
| Pedantically, literally everyone can be a founder.
|
| At this moment, you can decide that you are starting a
| company. You are now a founder.
|
| (This is why Founder is historically an unprestigious job
| that smells a lot like Unemployed, though the startup
| hype cycle of the last 15 years changed that.)
| j45 wrote:
| I'd say HBR reading leaders often lead an existing company that
| they weren't the founders of. Or maybe it's not a founder led
| company anymore.
|
| Founders have to lead themselves and other while going from 0
| to 1.
|
| I'm not sure what you are saying is accurate.
|
| Even if Paul was rewriting a topic... more than one writer
| writes about a topic for their readers, no?
|
| The MBA form of management using people as process .. is
| increasingly less applicable and in need of updating .. where
| software increasingly can push papers and connect people and
| processes.
|
| We don't see this much in management consulting or MBAs very
| much. Maybe there's a benefit to leaving how the world was.
| Eumenes wrote:
| HBR is certainly conventional, but the content is pretty much
| indistinguishable from what a LLM would tell you. There's a
| reason its popular among HR careerists, the PMC, and MBAs. All
| the content just reads like generic self help literature to me.
| I far prefer the casual nature of a blog post from someone like
| pg.
| fwip wrote:
| LLMs excel at regurgitating conventional wisdom. Paul, on the
| other hand, is doing it poorly.
| vslira wrote:
| I think you're being too dismissive of a third kind of player
| that is neither "leader" or "manager", which is "owners".
|
| There's a saying (which I'm sure has an English equivalent)
| where I live that goes something like "It's the owner's gaze
| which fattens the cow".
|
| Owner vs manager is the original "AI alignment problem",
| usually taught as the principal-agent problem in business
| schools, and is very real. SV-type founders are, by and large,
| meaningful owners in their enterprises and thus heavily
| invested (literally) in the company's performance. Professional
| managers, leaders or not, are just selling their labor. There
| is a whole field of management science about designing proper
| compensation structures to make CEOs better aligned with
| shareholders, but you get that quicker by making them the same
| person.
|
| Of course there's a whole other world of majority shareholders
| leveraging their position to extract value from minority
| shareholders, which is just another version of the same
| problem.
|
| All this to say, you're right that there's prior art about what
| he's writing, but its the principal-agent problem, not leaders
| vs managers, and in general business literature does not equate
| the issue of founder ownership with the PA-problem (obviously
| any undergrad can link the two issues, but that's not how
| they're usually approached)
| Terretta wrote:
| > _too dismissive of a third kind of player that is neither
| "leader" or "manager", which is "owners"_
|
| A recent science fiction series explores this exact concept
| against a tableau of post-democracy communism, socialism,
| fascism, and libertarianism:
|
| _The Owner Trilogy_ , by Neal Asher:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24087399-the-complete-
| ow...
|
| (The read of it is something like Altered Carbon meets The
| Expanse.)
| baxtr wrote:
| But when pg says something the fanboys get excited!
| rawgabbit wrote:
| TLDR. The first article says managers are political infighters
| who work in an organization whose primary purpose is self
| preservation. Leaders are transformative and defy the
| historical inertia and offer novel solutions.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Well put as always. Here's what I think is the primary
| alternative hypothesis.
|
| Assume that it's very hard to forecast a manager's fit and future
| performance. With a new CEO, _manager mode_ is the less-risky
| proposition. Spread risk around by delegating more. The founder
| has a proven track record leading the company, making _founder
| mode_ usually preferable.
|
| In other words, the non-founder CEO may just be one of the
| _professional fakers_ that the essay mentions as plausible
| subordinates. There 's a ton of research literature on adverse
| selection of CEOs. Some of it goes back decades, so there's
| always the question of whether the selection process has improved
| over time. But there will always be people that excel at getting
| selected and promoted.
|
| The way this hypothesis differs from the essay's is in boiling
| down to actual performance. A high-performing non-founder does
| not need _manager mode_ , while a low-performing founder would be
| better off with it.
| throwadobe wrote:
| Manager mode assumes that workers clock in and do what they can
| to drive the company forward. But there is no altruism among
| workers. Their decisions are for themselves first and for the
| company second.
| talkingtab wrote:
| Our understanding of organizations completely derives from
| military and manufacturing. It is essentially top down. Heck, our
| whole society and schooling is top down. Someone else knows more
| than you and is better at things than you are. So if you want to
| be good at something, you follow. Guess what?
|
| So what is the alternative to top down? Another model is that the
| persons in an organization act in two roles. First they
| effectuate. They take effective action. The people 'in situ' know
| what the situation is. Secondly they act as sensors. They provide
| information to others. And groups can act in the same way.
|
| We humans evolved by being very good at this model. There were no
| CEO's in small communities. There were no schools that taught you
| how to be a hunter gatherer or make cheese.
|
| Yes I know that large corporations and armies have in the past
| scaled better. Perhaps that is because we have had better
| technology to give orders better than to collaborate.
|
| The (mythical) Mythical Man Month tells us that New York City
| cannot exist. And no corporation runs NYC. So clearly it cannot
| exist. Right? Yet it does. Perhaps we need to understand how. My
| attempts have started with 'Hidden Order' by John Holland. Don't
| follow it. Just use it as a starting point.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow elaborates at length
| on this, pulling in recent research and reevaluating old anthro
| and archaeological work
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Absolutely
| tarcon wrote:
| I think the emergent order we see in society and how we could
| use it to effectively organize our work exists in the
| background thoughts of Brian Robertsons Holacracy. He mentions
| it in his introductory talk at TEDx.
| kragen wrote:
| you're describing societies, not companies. societies rely on
| forms of collaboration that are more resilient than delegated
| authority. liberals often point out markets--i don't have to
| depend on the goodwill of the butcher and baker, etc.--but
| other forms like charity, science (including open-source
| software), and reputation systems are also crucial to enabling
| nyc to exist
|
| delegated authority is fragile in the face of people making
| mistakes or just prioritizing their own interests over the
| interests of the group--as people often do. markets, published
| reproducible experiments, generosity, and gossip also suffer
| from those, of course, but they're better at self-correcting
| bjornsing wrote:
| > There were no CEO's in small communities.
|
| Now go tell Sitting Bull.
| richrichie wrote:
| There is a huge survivorship bias in this start-up wisdom space.
| And none of these gurus mention it. Probably because it is not
| good for the brand.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| > So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did
| partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple.
|
| What is the essence of Steve Jobs' management style?
| knighthack wrote:
| Your characterization using the phrase "conventional wisdom" is
| demeaning.
|
| I've found that a lot of wisdom PG passes on is novel, not
| 'conventional'; moreover the observation he offers is not
| something I would have been able to obtain through my own life
| experience, and I very much appreciate him putting his thoughts
| out into the world for us to learn from.
| lencastre wrote:
| Gervais principle, like it or not,... has been pretty accurate
| IMO
| alok-g wrote:
| I just read about it below, and can now correlate with some
| personal experiences. Thanks for sharing.
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
| frinxor wrote:
| yep, my first though as well here - and one of my favorite
| reads.
|
| lots of posts, even one this month
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41214180
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767151
| habosa wrote:
| The reason founders are different is because they generally own
| enormous chunks of the equity. Everything matters to them and the
| rewards of success are enormous.
|
| Us "fakers" get 0.1% if we're lucky and then pg writes an essay
| saying we're not trying hard enough. We are.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I think this is under discussed/not understood in startup land,
| particularly by the young. Maybe this is by design.
|
| Of course the founder is highly motivated, they can become a
| billionaire if all goes well.
|
| And the VC guys are essentially holders of a diversified basket
| of lottery tickets requiring that they attend some board
| meetings and give advice.
|
| For the IC level, especially if not "founding engineer", the
| upside is an EV+ outcome where you make what, 10% more than if
| you just went the MAG7 route? The downside is you work 2x
| harder to make 50% less than the MAG7 route and ends in a
| layoff where your last paycheck doesn't even clear.
| ichik wrote:
| OTOH (writing from 20-year working experience with two thirds of
| it in early stage startups) more often than not founders are not
| actually competent technically or otherwise. And "letting people
| do their job" at best means a permission to speak up and
| endlessly argue with conflicting opinions from colleagues, but
| not a permission to execute if that means commanding others to do
| something, because the delegation of power to do that is not
| being given due to the aforementioned lack of expertise and
| inability to judge if an idea is good or bad.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I think a lot of companies get stuck in a "mess middle" where
| they've outgrown founder mode, but the people brought in to be
| responsible for various parts of the org chart are not actually
| empowered.
|
| So you no longer have the permissive open structure of a small
| company, but are still small enough that the founder is
| arbitrarily/implicitly making a lot of decisions that have on
| paper been delegated.
|
| For ICs/people lower down the org chart this is extremely
| disheartening because you end up reporting to someone who
| doesn't actually make the decisions, but instead shields you
| from the decision maker & the decision making process.
|
| I've seen this in ~200-1000 person size orgs.
| zug_zug wrote:
| I think the idea that managers are professional liars are
| something boards need tackle head-on if they want to see stock
| prices rise.
|
| Throughout my career I've seen a lot of managers willfully focus
| more on crafting a narrative of "everything is fine" than fixing
| problems -- usually by hiding and mismeasuring known problem
| areas for example. At first I thought those were bad apples, but
| I came to realize those managers' managers are perfectly content
| with this type of dishonesty, because they get credit if it's not
| caught, and can wash their hands of it if they have plausible
| deniability.
|
| So multiple times I see a founding team who's utterly sincere,
| and then a huge management chain that believes in nothing,
| couldn't care less about customers, and treats the whole job as a
| game/performance, and some very sincere engineers. And I just
| think to myself... "How does the C level not see this?"
| nobunaga wrote:
| Paul graham is nothing but another corporate shill who has ruined
| the lives of others to benefit a few. Why does our industry keep
| following advice from people like this? Stop putting this guy on
| a pedestal. Manager mode, founder mode blah blah blah. Seriously.
| Next year he will write something else contradicting this point
| of view. Just read his essays. It's all nonsense and we end up
| supporting it. Stop making Silicon Valley people some god like
| person to follow. It's ridiculous.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Manager mode sounds like magical thinking mode.
| fnord77 wrote:
| > Brian Chesky gave a talk
|
| anyone find this talk he's referring to?
| euph0ria wrote:
| Also looking for it..
| ivoras wrote:
| Oh, that's easy: "founder mode" means the founder is hyperfocused
| (or in the oldspeak, obsessed) on his work (with his company) and
| optimizes (micromanages) everything. We know that already.
| Perfection demands micromanagement. Steve Jobs was actually doing
| that - reaching down the ranks and directly helping (molesting)
| people doing some piece of a larger product he particularly cared
| about.
|
| It also often causes (or is caused by) eccentric behavior (or
| mental issues) - but it's been done since forever, and when it's
| successful, we call it "visionary." When it's not, we call it
| "toxic."
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Musk is a good example of this. Amazing visionary; also
| extremely toxic.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I'm not surprised this theme would be popular with founding CEOs
| but not really sure what the promised "Ground-breaking Management
| Mode you Won't Believe!" actually is. Is it take your favourite
| employees on a retreat, don't worry about the message this sends?
| Stop hiring mediocre middle managers and do... something else?
| Run a giant public company like a 20-person start-up, only don't?
| Delegate yet stay in control of everything?
|
| Sharing how impactful the event/talk/whatever was, without the
| actual content, lots of name-dropping to build credibility,
| selective repackaging of conventional, well-known wisdom and a
| conclusion that fits nicely with exactly what SV executives want
| to hear == every Paul Graham post in the past 5+ years.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| I think one point is that there is no shortcut to building a
| great product/company/society/nation.
|
| You seem to be looking for a checklist where none exists. As
| many people have outlined in this thread, the difference is a
| founder takes everything about the company personally as an
| extension of themselves, and as a central point who can keep
| everything aligned. A manager ensures that directives given
| from top are followed and results delivered to the best of
| their abilities and any prevalent constraints.
| natosaichek wrote:
| I feel like this article is reaching towards similar conclusions:
|
| https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/30/when-the-mismanageri...
|
| Trained managers have learned how to continue to extract value
| from some discovered market, rather than create new value chains.
| Isamu wrote:
| Walt Disney worked in founder mode. That was partly enabled by
| his brother running the purely "business" end that would have
| taken up much of his time. So Walt was able to get involved all
| the way down to the smallest details.
|
| The downside is that when he died he left an organization that
| relied on that strong founder making things work.
|
| Bob Iger is a delegator that handles the business, he doesn't get
| deeply involved in the creative direction, he needs good creative
| leadership to report to him.
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| When talking about Disney, I also think it's worth tossing
| Michael Eisner into the mix as a comparison point for a non-
| founder who operated in something really close to the "Founder
| Mode" that the article describes. He got involved in creative
| decisions, and - speaking to the article's mentioning of
| micromanagement - famously said that 'micromanagement is
| underrated.' His style seems close, at least, to the style the
| article mentions.
|
| It's funny, because a lot of people think about a small number
| of bad decisions during his tenure (the amount spent on
| EuroDisney, souring the Pixar relationship) but I actually
| think Eisner's run at Disney is one of the best non-founder
| stints at a large company in modern American business.
| Isamu wrote:
| I agree, although maybe Eisner was a bit of a hybrid, and was
| able to be a bridge between the founder model that Disney
| relied on for years and the current structure.
| feedforward wrote:
| A common western rebuke to countries that had communist
| revolutions were that the revolutionary leader stayed in power
| for decades until their death. Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong. Fidel
| Castro's power passed to his brother five years before he died,
| so he does not fit the cookie cutter mode fully.
|
| Another rebuke is how the communist party filled a religious or
| even feudal void to some extent - Lenin's tomb in Red Square
| being a perfect example. I can assure you that though the
| Politburo felt that was a needed measure, they did feel a bit
| silly and embarrassed about having to do it.
|
| Why was all of this felt necessary within the Politburo? The
| answer is simple, in fact the answer is somewhat answered in this
| essay, if parallels are allowed for. Before the revolution, all
| revolutionaries were true believers who faced prison, exile and
| death fighting against impossible odds for years and decades.
| Those who join the party after the success of the revolution are
| always feared to be the parallel of the middle manager MBA
| managing up. A Gorbachev, a Yeltsin. The cadre around Deng
| Xiaoping who reversed his purge from the party and then put him
| in power.
|
| A very different circumstance, but in many ways analogous.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Professional managers will absolutely run a company at 20%
| optimization while founders might get to 80%.
|
| But if the founder gets hit by a bus it's going to drop to 2% or
| die. Professional management is like a lot of software tools, you
| can build a better framework yourself that is better suited to
| your usecase but no one else knows how to use it or can learn in
| a reasonable amount of time.
|
| This isn't saying management is always the right route. A founder
| can lead for 30+ years, but they could also quit or get hit by a
| bus tomorrow so its not always irrational for shareholders to
| pick the "less efficient" option here
| steveBK123 wrote:
| A benign summary of what professional management brings to
| large orgs is essentially variance reduction.
|
| Set up organization, process, systems, etc such that 99% of the
| staff becomes more or less interchangeable in the long run.
| This allows organizations to outlive their founders.
| nashadelic wrote:
| I like this analogy. And I suppose that's the risk-reward trade
| off: a founder can really get more out of a company than a
| manager but when you lose them it's a drop. But I would argue
| that you can always find professional management when the
| founder is out.
| arauhala wrote:
| If I'm reading this correctly, a few themes PG touches here are:
|
| 1) loss of control when hiring a professional manager without
| intrusion to sub organization, because you rely on the manager
| provided information. If the manager is not straightforward, the
| sub organization may become a black box, where issues can go
| unseen
|
| 2) Lack of access to the frontline people and their
| understanding, which is opened by the Jobs like key people
| meeting across the org
|
| 3) Id also imagine that if you have a founder with deep domain
| knowledge, who has worked across all aspects of business, going
| fully hands off with the details, and replacing decision makers
| with more generic managers potentially from other industries,
| means that lot of expertise gets disconnected from the relevant
| decisions.
|
| Ultimately the outcomes are all about the decisions and the
| decisions are all about understanding, which is all about the
| information. As such, it's not surprising if cutting the seasoned
| founder from both key mid level decisions and the firsthand
| information flows brings disadvantages.
|
| I'd over all interpret the article to be about how hands on the
| founder should be about the different aspects of the business
| rather than the leadership, as implied elsewhere
| redbell wrote:
| > Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good
| people and give them room to do their jobs." He followed this
| advice and _the results were disastrous_. So he had to _figure
| out a better way on his own_
|
| This is why I still _strongly_ advocate that, at some point in
| your career, you may consider _reinventing the wheel_ if needed.
|
| > In effect there are two different ways to run a company:
| founder mode and manager mode.
|
| An interesting video [1] from _Logically Answered_ referred to
| CEOs of type _manager mode_ as _Vanilla CEOs_. In short, the
| video raises questions about innovation versus stability; while
| these _Vanilla CEOs_ excel in financial growth, they may lack
| visionary leadership that is a built-in feature in the founder 's
| DNA.
|
| _________________
|
| 1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3RV8nMzh8
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I get the criticism of manager mode but does this article really
| articulate what founder mode is? Does it deliberately not specify
| it in order to leave it to Chesky's talk?
| sharkbot wrote:
| I'm thinking of the metaphor between Newtonian and general
| relativity. At low energies, masses and velocities the two
| theories correspond in predictions with little discrepancy. If
| the velocity/mass/energies increase dramatically, then Newtonian
| physics will fail to give accurate predictions.
|
| Same with "hire smart people and let them work". When salaries
| are relatively low, consequences are limited and incentives are
| well aligned, that approach works. As soon as any of those things
| change, then the "manager mode" fails dramatically.
|
| As someone who ascribes to "manager mode" most of the time, I'm
| going to start looking more at places where the assumptions break
| and (carefully) try out "founder mode".
| hoosieree wrote:
| Imagine being so close to understanding something, but your whole
| identity requires you to _not_ understand it.
|
| Venture capital (VC) is fundamentally at odds with good business.
| VC demands exponential growth from a finite world; something has
| to give. What usually happens is the company grows to the point
| that it's impossible to keep the "professional fakers" away. Then
| the Iron Law[1] kicks in, or enshittification[2], or both.
|
| Do you want the benefits of a small company (sustainability,
| happy employees, happy customers, good products)? Then build a
| small company. If you want the opposite of those things but also
| lots of money, try your hand at the VC blackjack tables. Maybe
| you'll be lucky and _this time, it will be different_.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail4...
|
| [2]: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
| bearjaws wrote:
| > turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them
| drive the company into the ground.
|
| What a long post to write "Well if you hire the wrong people they
| will drive the company into the ground"
| onursurme wrote:
| Do you have a link for the full talk?
| highfrequency wrote:
| I have a different resolution for the paradox about letting good
| people do their thing vs. micromanaging. PG's resolution is to
| split on the CEO - are they a founder or a professional manager?
|
| I would instead split on the _employee_ : are they in a
| competitive position where 1) direct performance can be evaluated
| directly, and 2) multiple other people have a substitutable role
| and can thus fill in for any deficiencies / blind spots? Or
| instead is the employee's seat a functional internal monopoly,
| where they have exclusive control over some key resource or
| process.
|
| If it's the former: management is trivial because _evaluation_ is
| trivial and deficiencies don't spread. But the latter case
| requires extreme vigilance from the CEO. This category
| encompasses all middle management. This vigilance cannot be
| delegated because the roles reporting to the CEO are
| definitionally the most susceptible to rent-seeking.
|
| The challenge is that a portion of people in the first spot will
| always seek to maneuver into the second spot.
| RichardKain wrote:
| I think the vast majority of businesses are run in "Founder
| Mode," and maybe the majority of start ups. That's why they don't
| make it. The books about delegation from the HBS crowd are in
| some respects a reaction to that default mode.
|
| Chesky and Jobs are obviously managerial outliers for their
| extreme accomplishment. Anytime one cites Jobs as a guru I'm
| reminded of an evaluation Bill Gates made about Jobs, to the
| effect of: entrepreneurs think Steve Jobs was an asshole, so they
| can be one too. But they're not Steve Jobs.
|
| Even then: Airbnb in Founder or Manager Mode efficacy is very
| hard to disentangle from Airbnb and Covid. With no Covid, manager
| mode continues - would it be worse off? Hard to say. Apple has
| done exceptionally well (at least financially) under Jobs'
| successor Cook, surely in manager mode.
|
| As other commenters note there are ample examples such as Nvidia
| (or Valve, Bloomberg, many others) which run as surprisingly flat
| but scaled organizations.
|
| Fear of the ossifying effects of bureaucracy is a consistent
| theme in PG's essays for good reason. Finding ways to
| incentivize/align middle managers with the same urgency a founder
| has is another. "Founder mode" in the wrong hands drives away
| other good managers and is perhaps best used in the Ben Horowitz
| framework of Wartime instead of Peacetime for companies.
|
| But boy I really do wish to have seen the original speech, surely
| more replete with details that answer my objections. I love the
| professional liars observation, they are the antagonists to both
| good founders and good managers.
| bjornsing wrote:
| You don't think the HBS crowd has kind of a vested interest
| here? They are on the top of the professional faker totem pole
| for god's sake. :)
| __loam wrote:
| I'm not sure which is worse, the MBAs with their
| proclamations coming from a place with a complete lack of
| experience or the founders who think they're a genius for
| riding an economic trend in one of the most forgiving markets
| in recent history.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Even though I run a company which has only 4 million profit per
| year, I have seen something similar that once a company starts
| being successful, you attract these people who's only job is to
| move from successful company to successful company in a sort of
| a circuit. They don't add much value but they know how to stay
| out of trouble.
|
| So what happens I think is that most business value is brought
| about by a very small percentage of a company's actual day-to-
| day productive output. However, as a company grows, you do need
| this additional people because without them the company will
| start losing value. But a very few people and very few work in
| the company actually adds value and gets the company to the
| next step. So imagine something like apple the iMac when they
| launched it and then the iPhone and then the iPod drove the
| company into what we know it to be today. But if they didn't
| have all of the other managers and stuff who were pushing
| papers and getting things going, the company wouldn't even
| exist. The founder really needs to know what matters in the
| company no matter how large it gets and how to go to the next
| step in the company and that will take very very little of the
| company's actual outputs. Figure out who are directly
| responsible for creating those outputs and create a direct
| relationship with them. Going through the mbas and the paper
| pushers is secondhand information and usually they are tampered
| with.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| AirBnB is contributing massively to the housing crisis. I can't
| wait until their parasitic business is banned from every
| continent! Paul Graham is buddies with Peter Thiel btw
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I think an interesting question this raises is what are the
| differences between effective founder mode companies and manager
| mode companies in terms of communication structure and how can
| this be modelled and analysed (e.g. using some kind of network
| analysis of a temporal graph).
| kulpreet wrote:
| I have a feeling that Apple's unique organizational structure[1]
| will likely share a lot what Paul is describing as "Founder Mode"
|
| [1] https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-
| innovatio...
| tlogan wrote:
| This is absolutely true, and it's surprising how little
| literature there is on this topic (I think founder is not synonym
| to leader so HBR articles are not 100% relevant).
|
| In my simplified view, founders care about the company like it's
| their baby. On the other hand, managers tend to focus more on
| their own careers, their teams, and external relationships. This
| is natural since they know they'll likely move on to a different
| company at some point.
| trunnell wrote:
| Counter-example: Reed Hastings, co-founder and the CEO of Netflix
| for 22 years, famously did the opposite of what pg is saying.
| Reed insisted on a particular style of employee freedom &
| responsibility that IMO set the benchmark for innovating year
| after year and avoiding micro-managers, even as it scaled up past
| 2000 engineers. This story still has not been fully told. Reed
| was closely involved but perhaps the opposite of Steve Jobs.
|
| Sounds like chesky and pg want to turn the tide on that dominant
| culture in software companies. And I couldn't agree more! A big
| problem IMO is that most "professional software managers" are
| taught a management style that focuses on risk. Risk-aversion
| permeates every decision from compensation to project priorities.
| It's so pervasive it's like the air they breathe, they don't even
| realize their doing it. This is how things run in 99% of
| companies.
|
| So, my fellow hackers. There is a better way. It's neither the
| Steve Jobs model nor the John Sculley model. Looks like pg has
| not yet found it. I hope he does, though. It would be great for
| YC to encourage experimentation here.
| tlogan wrote:
| The issue is that we don't have a clear understanding of what
| "founder mode" truly entails.
|
| But, I predict that once Reed Hastings leaves Netflix, the
| company will begin to decline.
| swalsh wrote:
| Has the company not already declined? I've been subscribed
| for years, but I cant remember the last time I watched
| something on it. The next time I do a round of canceling
| subscriptions, there is a very real chance it's gone. I have
| so many other subscriptions, I'm just not sure it's important
| enough to me anymore to make the cut.
| latchkey wrote:
| Have you looked at the stock price recently?
| swalsh wrote:
| I'd argue decline lags value fundumentals. Sears decline
| took decades. The early metric is probably "viewer hours"
| per customer or some use base metric. That will probably
| dip before the revenue dips.
| latchkey wrote:
| Zoom out on the chart. Sear's stock looks nothing like
| Netflix. Sears was killed by totally different
| circumstances.
|
| We're at covid peak ATH again. Anyone who bought the dip
| in 2022, is looking like a genius with fantastic gains.
|
| The more money Netflix has, the more they invest into
| better content. People look at the base metrics, which is
| why they are investing... along with a healthy dose of
| dump money into stonks that are earning more than
| interest rates. Once the fed starts to cut rates, things
| go even higher.
| nvarsj wrote:
| I don't think Netflix is for you and me. I can't remember
| the last time I watched a Netflix show. The content is
| bad, the UI is bad, everything is bad compared to what I
| remember of the early Netflix days.
|
| _But_ the stock is way up and their subscriber count
| keeps increasing. They have obviously found a formula
| that keeps the masses happy. And they are succeeding
| despite heavy competition. Can't argue with the facts.
| fallinditch wrote:
| PG's commentary is interesting but I think he is leaning
| towards an unsatisfactory conclusion. He's trying to simplify
| management into modes but in reality life is more complex and
| nuanced.
|
| Chesky's experience instead says to me that as managers we
| should be be wary of all advice and management styles and
| playbooks. For sure it's good to listen to advice and learn
| about management but life and managing a business are so much
| more complex than any set of rules or observations can
| describe.
|
| In fact, since every organization's situation is unique, then
| managers should take all advice and accepted wisdom with a
| pinch of salt and forge ahead with their own unique set of
| principles for their own unique set of challenges. This is
| what Chesky deduced.
|
| I would also go one step further and assert that it's a
| positive sign if a founder goes against the grain and breaks
| the rules - success is more likely than if they follow the
| established way of doing things. This is innovation.
|
| Perhaps this is the 'founder mode' that PG is trying to
| uncover: think different.
| jbs789 wrote:
| This was my takeaway too. We are all different, in the
| skills we bring to the table and the problems in front of
| us, and a good leader is self aware and discovers the
| solutions for their problem, not blindly copy someone
| else's.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I have a feeling the other alternative is just indiehacking +
| AI. Little management needed, much smaller companies.
| dsugarman wrote:
| I don't know nearly enough to make a firm claim here but I
| don't think what you're describing sounds like a definitive
| counter example. There's a big difference between giving lower
| level employees creative freedom and letting c level executives
| have free roam over their domain with little oversight or
| Founder involvement.
| trunnell wrote:
| _...letting c level executives have free roam over their
| domain with little oversight or Founder involvement._
|
| I agree with you, I think. pg's point was that "Steve Jobs
| Mode" is the opposite of founders letting their C-level execs
| roam free. I don't agree.
|
| I think the improved model is "free roaming managers with
| lots of transparency and accountability."
|
| "Free roaming" and "no accountability" are a recipe for
| disaster.
|
| But a CEO/exec/manager who reaches 2, 3, or more levels into
| their org and gives specific direction is a recipe for
| mismanagement. It violates the golden rule: don't create a
| role with two bosses.
| gwd wrote:
| > It violates the golden rule: don't create a role with two
| bosses.
|
| Right, but on the other side, in the military they told us:
| "You can delegate authority, but you can't delegate
| responsibility." If part of the CEO is to be a manager for
| the C-suite, then he needs to be able to evaluate how the
| CxO is behaving as a manager; and that would seem to imply
| looking 2 or 3 levels down to see what's going on beneath
| them.
|
| That's not to say the CEO should go around randomly
| countermanding orders and giving new ones. The CxO can't do
| their job that way. But it does mean that the CEO should
| have a clear picture about what's going on, form their own
| opinions, and either give guidance / constructive criticism
| or fire where appropriate.
| xipho wrote:
| Steam (Valve) too.
| stroupwaffle wrote:
| I think it's important to gleam some insights from past
| successes, but ultimately these "case studies" have over
| factors. For example, the time with which Apple, Netflix,
| Facebook, and so on, flourished. Where talent existed, what the
| landscape looked like, is quite possibly totally different than
| anything today.
|
| Take the iPhone: a product so good at a time when there wasn't
| much like it. A guaranteed success. You're going to have talent
| rally around it and get excited for it to succeed. But that's
| been done, and in the Phone landscape, there's never going to
| be such an event again.
|
| So in general, it's never one size fits all. We can learn from
| the greats, but it's best to develop our own, situational ideas
| along the way.
| trunnell wrote:
| Good points in pg's essay:
|
| * CEO/founder should engage directly at multiple levels rather
| than only interact with the company through their direct
| reports. (Same applies at every management level, btw)
|
| * Delegation is good, and it should happen in proportion with
| trust.
|
| * The dominant culture at many tech companies is flawed and
| sub-optimal.
|
| Bad points:
|
| * "Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides".
| The two supporting points could both be true: "VCs who haven't
| been founders themselves don't know how founders should run
| companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the
| most skillful liars in the world." However, it does not follow
| that the only option left is "Steve Jobs Style."
|
| * "an annual retreat for [...] the 100 most important
| people"... I have trouble envisioning an effective org chart
| with lots of people at the top who would not also be in the
| "top 100" list. If your department heads are not your most
| skilled operators, then... maybe that's a good problem to fix.
|
| * Assuming that the skills and intuition that make a founder
| successful will 100% apply to the very different job of being
| the chief of a 2000-person tribe. We should not assume that.
|
| On average, everyone has an equal chance of needing to learn
| something new to succeed in a new situation-- founders
| included. Don't let pg's founder flattery go to your head.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| There are many very good reasons why the top 100 most
| valuable people would not be the department heads.
|
| Cracked engineers, designers, growth people, AEs... the best
| ICs shouldn't necessarily be in management positions. Yet,
| the CEO should neither be air-gapped from those people nor
| managing their work/career on a day to day basis.
| boredtofears wrote:
| I don't think there's any reason to believe IC's who follow
| the "cracked engineer" manifesto would be in the top
| percentile. It's basically a guideline to make people more
| manageable and has little to do with engineering talent.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| I have no idea what you're talking about. Cracked is just
| slang for insanely talented, ergo...
| boredtofears wrote:
| I've only heard the term in reference to
| https://posthog.com/founders/cracked-manifesto
| taormina wrote:
| Which is the same thing. You've also heard them called
| rockstars or x10 before. They are referring to the same
| folks, but calling them "easy to manage" is a hilarious
| statement.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Characteristics like "Stay optimistic at all times",
| "Make people feel excited and energized", and "Behave in
| a completely authentic way" are not really things I
| associated with rockstar/10x engineers (which is also a
| complete BS label for different reasons).
| nberkman wrote:
| "Crack", not "cracked".
|
| "Crack": adj., first-rate; excellent: a crack shot.
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/crack
|
| "Cracked": no such meaning
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cracked
| ywain wrote:
| Urban Dictionary might be a better place for recent
| internet slang:
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked
| mellosouls wrote:
| "cracked" is a common term (eg) on social media and other
| informal use and is used meaning the same as "crack"
| above
|
| (edit) see the urban dictionary definition in the sibling
| comment.
| hluska wrote:
| I like this comment because I think it does a good job of
| demonstrating four kinds of important people.
|
| You have people who are most important to a:
|
| - a project. - a problem. - the organization.
|
| And I think we can divide organization into internal and
| external. When you divide like that, you'll usually end up
| with four very different lists with some overlap at an
| upper management level.
|
| None of the four areas are more important than others. If
| your software problem has a month long outage, that's a
| huge problem. But that's different from if you only have
| two months of runway left or if nobody has cleaned your
| office in a month. And since the problems are different,
| the people involved should be different too. Then you'll
| end up with a lot of different hierarchies of most
| important people depending on what lens you're looking
| through.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| The top 100 people also include low level employees who
| know the day-to-day reality and won't bullshit you the way
| mid-level managers will. And no: all the people who are
| going to respond to this and say the problem is to hire
| good, honest, no BS managers, good luck with that. It's
| like saying the way to make money in the stock market is to
| buy low and sell high.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| It's less a question of if they should be managers and more
| whether there should be formal title recognition. Many
| companies have "distinguished engineer" positions or
| similar, and those people are often involved in high level
| conversations.
|
| In Jobs' case, his personality was probably strong enough
| that didn't matter but broadly it can be helpful to
| officially say, "this person is important even though they
| don't manage anyone". It helps with fairness so that people
| don't have to seek out the "secret" ways of being
| important, and it can accelerate decision making in the
| absence of someone like Steve Jobs
| jmb99 wrote:
| My company of ~1600 currently does annual retreats with
| 90-110ish people. All of the C suite and their direct
| reports, but also a good number of engineers and other ICs,
| as well as some "line-level" managers, and 10 people who have
| been identified as "up and comers" (usually ICs relatively
| early in their careers, but not exclusively - over the last
| decade, probably 30-40% have been managers of some sort who
| were well into their careers but identified as key people in
| the organization for a number of reasons).
|
| Many of the people at the retreat last year were happy
| exactly where they were, because they were contributing the
| project/team/company/etc exactly how they wanted to be. This
| was especially true of the senior engineers in attendance.
| Just because you're a top performer, it does not follow that
| you also want to be a top-level executive.
| maxnevermind wrote:
| A side question.
|
| > ...Just because you're a top performer...
|
| Do you just trust performance reviews for finding them? My
| experience in BigTech that those can't be always trusted.
| It seems getting good reviews is a skill and some people
| are better at it while some others might not even care
| about ratings at all.
| jmb99 wrote:
| I don't think "performance reviews" in the traditional
| sense are a silver bullet for finding the sorts of
| employees to invite to such a retreat. They're good for
| finding "top performers" (by definition - you define what
| performance looks like, score your employees on it, and
| the ones with the highest score are your "top
| performers"). I personally don't think that's
| particularly useful, and it's almost completely useless
| from the perspective of trying to find up-and-coming
| employees, or insightful employees, or whoever else is
| most useful to the company at such a retreat.
|
| Finding "true" top performers requires much more effort
| than your average mid-large company wants to spend. You
| need a collaborative effort between individual
| contributors, line managers, VPs, and the C-suite to get
| a good idea of who the most important people in the
| company are. And part of that is politics (making sure
| that everyone knows who you are and why you're important)
| - there's always a chance that a super critical person
| slips under the radar.
|
| As an engineer I can tell you who the most important
| people in my section of the org chart are off-hand, in
| order of importance. As in, people without whom my org
| would fail, or at least flounder. Some of them are
| engineers, some of them are sales/business liaison, some
| of them are "management" (but frequently do a hell of a
| lot more than "just" manage). I don't think a traditional
| performance review would identify all of them as being
| mission-critical, but it would probably identify them all
| as performing at least as expected for their roles.
|
| I know at least one fairly critical junior engineer[0]
| that maybe isn't the fastest or most efficient worker,
| but is learning fast and could easily be a top-tier
| engineer with the right support and growth opportunities.
| Fortunately my company did identify this and has given
| them a number of opportunities (including an invite to
| the retreat, among many others), but a standard
| performance review would probably score them as
| "adequate" or whatever other mid-tier. The way this
| happened for us is frequent "skip-level" meetings, 1-1 or
| 1-many, as well as quarterly team retreats with all
| members (up to the VP) present. This allows 3 levels of
| employees to all interact, and if you keep on top of this
| as a senior manager or VP (with either an engineering
| background or an open mind, which all people in this
| scenario have) it becomes fairly straightforward to find
| these people. It's not a formula, or a set of
| rules/identifiers, or even some guidelines that are
| followed, which makes it tricky to make this "fair" - it
| relies on everyone involved having good judgement.
|
| [0] I know "critical junior engineer" doesn't sound
| great, but it's what happens when you have a rag-tag team
| of engineers building a product from the ground up with
| minimal support from the rest of the company (and thus
| few resources), and then hit it big and suddenly have a
| largely successful product on your hands that was written
| by essentially 4 people. Each one of those 4 people are
| non-overlapping domain experts, and it just so happens
| that 3 of them are senior engineers and 1 is a junior.
| Over the last 6 months this has been improving, but a
| year ago, it literally was 1 critical junior engineer who
| was the only person who knew about 20% of the product.
| trunnell wrote:
| Generally, no. I agree with you.
|
| In every case I've seen with healthy leadership, you
| could just ask who the top people are. Up to about
| 200-person size groups, you could ask any leader (even
| the top group leader) and they could just tell you.
| Because they generally know who is doing what, how
| difficult the various things are and who is turning in
| consistently outstanding work. (If the leadership can't
| do this, they might not be paying close enough
| attention.)
|
| Performance reviews can serve many different purposes,
| but I don't think this is one of them.
| trunnell wrote:
| Ok, good point. There's certainly nothing wrong with non-
| managers being key people who should contribute to this
| hypothetical 100-person offsite, out of a 2000-person
| company.
|
| I was reacting to the idea that the "top execs" are
| generally not the people you'd want. There was an undertone
| in pg's description that seemed to me like, "SJ hated those
| stupid and ineffective managers so he bypassed them to
| invite the people doing the real work."
|
| I've worked in places with some ineffective managers, and
| at bigger companies I've witnessed a few ladder-climbing
| sociopathic liars, so I get the sentiment.
|
| I just think it's more useful to figure out how to remove
| those ineffective people, or better yet build a cultural
| immune system that rejects them, rather than bypass them.
| nicodjimenez wrote:
| I bet that Reed Hastings has a sub organization at Netflix that
| is run in founder mode, even if most of the organization is run
| in manager mode.
|
| Whether orgs are run in manager mode or founder mode depends on
| whether there is a founder level leader available and nature of
| the changes that need to occur for the organization to remain
| competitive. Some orgs or sub-orgs cannot afford to have a
| founder making radical changes, because the risk this will lead
| to an exponential rise in defects for end customers is greater
| than the potential benefit.
|
| PG tailors to startups and for startups the risk of the wrong
| product is generally much greater than the risk of product
| defects. So I tend to agree with his points here.
| svnt wrote:
| Hastings is rather unique in the current founder era in that he
| had previously founded a company, recognized he did not have
| the ability to manage it, attempted to step down, and then was
| told by his board to figure it out. He went on to essentially
| succeed in this and take his company public.
|
| Here is a person that recognized the problems of the stage pg
| was talking about, undertook a deliberate study of them, was
| successful enough in managing them, and then went on to found
| and grow Netflix.
|
| Most founders have not previously taken a company public,
| especially via Hasting's humble route. Having done so would
| enable him to prevent exactly the kind of problems pg is
| referring to while still being himself.
|
| Jobs and Hastings have very different personalities and
| methods, but both probably achieved the same function within
| their organizations.
| trunnell wrote:
| I agree and I'm following you right up to your last
| statement. I'm doubtful that Jobs and Hastings had similar
| functions or operated similarly. I worked with Reed but not
| with Steve. I know a few people who interacted with Steve,
| and their stories don't sound anything at all like how Reed
| operates.
| torginus wrote:
| It's a bit off topic, but I've never understood while people
| hold Netflix as some engineering Holy Grail.
|
| Their product is straightforward feature-wise, and pushing a
| low-teen megabits per second of static video data on the
| internet in a somewhat timely manner is not a huge technical
| challenge nowadays (or 10 years ago).
|
| Doing stuff like real-time video streaming, where you have to
| encode and push video to users with very low latency
| requirements (like Google Stadia) or with moderately relaxed
| latency but broadcast to a lot of users, like Twitch, or having
| a mind-bogglingly huge library like Youtube, is probably orders
| of magnitude harder.
|
| I do like their shows, and probably a lot of technical wizardry
| VFX goes into making them, but getting the bytes to the end
| user is not it.
|
| I'm sure there's a lot of adversarial smarts there, where
| brilliant engineers come up with incredibly complex solutions
| to simple problems, and it requires even more brilliance to
| make things run smoothly, but I'm sure their problems could be
| solved with simple pragmatic engineering.
| j45 wrote:
| It's not straight forward at scale
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| Care to elaborate? Most things boil down to client side
| features like streaming the video with HLS or DASH, even if
| it's not live just to get the encoding benefits. DRM is its
| own thing.
|
| I think it's important to have the distinction between
| delivering video content and the in-app experience. I do
| think streaming VOD is way easier than live content.
| YZF wrote:
| You also need a CDN. NetFlix deploys boxes all over the
| place to cache the content.
|
| I agree there's nothing in there that's not understood
| from an engineering/technology perspective. It's not
| fusion or curing cancer. But scale and complexity
| compound simple engineering problems. There monitoring,
| there's billing, there's machine learning, there's
| software lifecycle, multitude of different devices types
| and networks, all of that at extreme scales that need to
| work pretty reliably.
| crdrost wrote:
| Slightly bigger challenges Netflix faces:
|
| * You have deals with N big media companies who each have
| their own restrictions on who can stream what from where. The
| list is constantly changing, so permissions to view media are
| locale-specific and revokable; you need a way to say "okay
| this person is not allowed any more to do that."
|
| * Multiple-screen detection emphatically needs to be rock
| solid. Someone is going to _unplug_ their Roku player when
| their laptop says "you 're watching from too many screens,"
| and by the time they get back to their laptop you need to be
| detecting them as streaming from 0 screens. At the same time
| a hiccup in this process shouldn't cause like 3% of your
| users to get a big streaming interruption as they don't seem
| to be online.
|
| * You have to recommend stuff based on what this person has
| watched. An acquisition team needs to do cluster analysis on
| this to get new stuff to fill all of the different clusters
| of interests that emerge in your user base.
|
| * People will search for shows you don't have. (Because of
| point 1, the big media companies only permit access to a
| fraction of their backlog.) You have to know this media that
| you don't have access to, well enough to recommend something
| related that might keep the user on Netflix instead of
| hopping to another service.
|
| * All of this has to happen on pretty low latencies when
| someone starts up Netflix. That is, anybody who jumps into
| Netflix should see a personalized view of what they were
| watching, what they can watch, filtered by your allow lists
| and not cached on their device, within just a few seconds.
|
| * All of this has to be portable to all of the different
| platforms Netflix supports.
| torginus wrote:
| > You have deals with N big media companies who each have
| their own restrictions on who can stream what from where.
| The list is constantly changing, so permissions to view
| media are locale-specific and revokable; you need a way to
| say "okay this person is not allowed any more to do that."
|
| Yeah, international media content licensing is very likely
| Netflix's moat. I'd wager starting a streaming service, and
| getting the big studios to host their content is pretty
| much impossible.
|
| Recommender systems are pretty well studied, and anyways,
| I'm sure it's significance for Netflix is overrated. People
| (including me) tend to watch the show everyone's talking
| about. It's a much more hairy issue for a site like
| Youtube, where users upload decades worth of content every
| day, and the site has to figure out what to show to which
| viewers, where the content's shelf-life might be measured
| in days, so building up collaborative filtering data might
| not be feasible.
|
| All the other technical issues are probably non-trivial,
| but I don't think any of them requires world-changing
| engineering prowess.
|
| Most engineering is non-trivial. If I attempted to design a
| washing machine, I'd probably fail miserably, and figuring
| how to do it well probably took collectively thousands of
| engineer-years. Doesn't mean it requires exclusively
| unicorn engineers.
| hluska wrote:
| Take those low teen megabits and scale it through $x users in
| $y locations streaming $z content items. Consider that 15% of
| those $x users will take to the internet to complain about
| problems. Also consider that once you're a big enough name,
| mainstream media will cover those complaints on slow news
| days. Finally consider that a large portion of budget goes
| into constantly maximizing x, y and z.
|
| Thats where the engineering problem goes from trivial to
| extremely complicated. Lots and lots of people demanding a
| similar quality of service across a wide pool of content on a
| wide pool of devices.
|
| And that doesn't even fully cover last mile issues.
| phonon wrote:
| Bingo! Watch and be afraid....
|
| https://youtu.be/s-vJcOfrvi0
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think this is incompatible with what Graham is saying.
| Netflix has a famously distinctive organization and management
| style; I don't know if it's literally Reed Hastings' stamp, but
| you can imagine it might be. Towards the end of the post,
| Graham talks about how he's not saying there won't be
| delegation; it just won't be black-box cookie-cutter
| delegation, into "engineering" and "marketing" and "sales" and
| "support". It rang pretty true to me.
|
| Bear in mind he's also responding to Brian Chesky's case study,
| which we're probably not going to get to hear much more about.
| asah wrote:
| yyy but also remember survivor bias: for every AirBnB, there's
| dozens of companies whose founders ran them into the ground for
| all the usual reasons, of which "lack of scaling" is both a lazy
| umbrella and also a subset of the failure modes, including
| burnout, malfeasance, pivoting too quickly or too slowly, etc.
|
| Consider the famous Osbourne Effect[1], so named after a founder
| who blew it spectacularly.
|
| Or how about the famous fraudsters whose schemes got so large
| because they lacked basic controls? (Ponzi to Madoff, but also
| Elizabeth Holmes and SBF)
|
| Or how about Jack Welch (GE) and David Calhoun (Boeing), lauded
| for years until their damage came to light?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| In Germany, there is a very related term called Mittelstand [1],
| which denotes long-standing businesses with similar values of
| nimbleness and long-term focus, instead of short-term gains as in
| manager-mode companies.
|
| These businesses usually don't grow that much, but they are very
| stable over time, even across economic downturns, because the
| owners/founders think long term.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| A founder is inherently more motivated than any manager or
| employee. Thus, the more hands-on the founder can be with as many
| employees as possible, the more that motivation will propagate
| throughout the company.
|
| The managerial perspective is "just pay people more to motivate
| them" or otherwise "strong vision will motivate".
|
| But paying someone more (at least beyond a class threshold) is
| only likely to motivate them in the short term. After a few
| months, they go back to hedonistic baseline.
|
| "Strong vision" is just corpo-speak for corpo-speak. Real vision
| comes from a founder pushing as many sides of the company as
| possible, often by example rather than meetings.
|
| Interestingly, our United States seems to have this problem.
| Genius and scrappy founders establish a government now overtaken
| by incompetent suits.
|
| It may be the natural way of things. Success leads to complacency
| leads to incompetence. Eventually new players take over and the
| cycle repeats. Creative destruction and all that.
| alberth wrote:
| I wish other "founder mode" examples were given other than Steve
| Jobs.
|
| Do people consider the following people to operate in Founder
| Mode:
|
| - Elon Musk?
|
| - Larry Ellison?
|
| - Mark Zuckerberg?
|
| - Marc Benioff?
|
| - Drew Houston?
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| the "david brooks" of business strikes again. simple, digestible
| "wisdom" that goes down easy, but is ultimately self
| congratulatory and too general to be meaningful. reading these
| posts is exactly the "fake work" paul grahm wrote about avoiding
| :P
| drones wrote:
| > Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the
| way they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some
| amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and
| how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company.
| They'll even vary from time to time within the same company, as
| managers earn trust. So founder mode will be more complicated
| than manager mode. But it will also work better. We already know
| that from the examples of individual founders groping their way
| toward it.
|
| What was the point of the article? Don't delegate important
| decisions to the people below you, except for when you do? What
| PG is suggesting is a founder should understand all problem
| spaces the company exists in, better than any other employee in
| any position, in perpetuity, because _no-one could possibly
| understand anything better than the founder_. If you want labour
| to scale, you need to let people actually do their job.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Some theories about what makes the founder mode effective:
|
| 1. It's about incentives. If I own substantial equity of a
| company and I consider it "my child", the reward for doing a good
| job will be much greater than if I was a hired manager. The
| reward is not just financial but also self-worth and reputation.
|
| 2. Selection bias. When we talk about "founders", we really mean
| founders that have built successful companies. This criterion
| selects only those founders that are remarkably good at their
| jobs. They are good CEOs in general and also good fits for their
| specific companies.
|
| 3. Deep knowledge of the company and the business. For example,
| they remember all of the things that were tried but didn't work.
|
| 4. They are much more willing to shape the company and have a
| high degree of control. If I'm a hired CEO, I'm managing someone
| elses organization, it doesn't feel ok to make drastic changes.
| My mental setting is that I'm trying to please my boss
| (shareholders, board). I'm not willing to tinker and try
| something with a high risk of failure, I want to manage someone
| else's property seriously and responsibly.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| I think it's related to the job market atm. Everyone is hired in
| a stretch position at very high comp. This is true for VPs,
| directors, ICs etc. Because of this it's less viable than it was
| as a manager to be fully hands off.
| swalsh wrote:
| I think there's a property which is hard to describe. But i've
| seen the opposite property countless times at companies. People,
| and leaders who are building "cool demos". Things that tell a
| great story, but somehow never materialize into any material
| revenue for the company. I've seen these guys move up into higher
| and higher positions, and yet the projects they build are simply
| great stories. The higher up the org you go, you'll find leaders
| who have refined this expertise into a really compelling, really
| easy to follow along story. But it just never materializes into
| revenue, and half the time it doesn't even materialie into a real
| product.
|
| I think what founders know, but what managers do not, is the
| formula. They're missing one of the key components. The
| perspective of your customer (what their business is, and the
| understanding of what is and what isn't important to them), and
| an understanding of how to deliver it (what capabilities does
| your customer have, how do they like to do business), and finally
| a perspective on how to deliver that value (an expertise in
| product).
|
| Many people are experts at "delivering" or they're experts at
| understanding their customers PoV, or they're experts at
| understanding how to do business with those customers. VERY FEW
| "professionals" have all 3... but you can tell a great story to
| other non-experts using only 2 of the points, and making up a
| reasonable sounding point for #3. Or worse, they become experts
| on selling to YOU (the founder) how to do these things.
| mrwww wrote:
| I have done the building in quite a few of these.
|
| Often what happens is that the engineering that made it a cool
| demo in the beginning, is pushed aside, and once funding and a
| variety of product managers and sales people start chiming in,
| users and genuine value proposition is forgotten in favor of
| things that sound huge for the business, in theory. Not seen it
| materialize in practice yet.
| swalsh wrote:
| Yeah, the opportunist managers are attracted to fresh value
| like sharks to blood. They always destroy it because they're
| trying to add in something that's good for their business
| (great story for upper management) but is either not wanted
| or even repulsive to the customer. It usually comes at the
| expense of the core value proposition.
| bengale wrote:
| > People, and leaders who are building "cool demos". Things
| that tell a great story, but somehow never materialize into any
| material revenue for the company.
|
| It takes experience to see something awesome, and still drill
| into who asked for it, what problem is it solving, what value
| is it generating for the end user, etc.
|
| It's easy to forget that sometimes even something super cool is
| not that useful and when the rubber hits the road, no-one will
| pay for it.
| therepo90hn wrote:
| God do I like the web style
| bjornsing wrote:
| One of the reasons Europe is falling behind in tech I think is
| that founders are pushed to manager mode much earlier, and going
| founder mode when the shit hits the fan is just about impossible
| [1].
|
| 1. If you think you have it bad with the "professional fakers" in
| the US, try an alternative reality were they can't legally be
| fired, or even demoted (e.g. Sweden).
| moffkalast wrote:
| Can confirm, I know of a small tech startup in southern EU that
| was founded by an American MBA wannabe type. Immediately after
| getting a mid sized B2B contract he pivoted into manager mode,
| expecting to grow to 200 people rapidly, and as one might
| expect the entire company imploded from disfunctionality in
| less than a year. Of course that was not the only issue that
| sank it, but I'm sure it contributed.
| digitcatphd wrote:
| Contacts who were at Tesla during Series A told me Elon Musk did
| the same thing having hundreds of one on ones with engineers
| addicted wrote:
| It's pretty clear why "hire good people and let them do their
| jobs" wouldn't work for AirBNB.
|
| AirBNB is a company that's entirely built upon getting around
| regulations and destroying wealth (but passing on the costs onto
| others).
|
| Good people coming in to the company assume it provides some
| actual value so they don't make decisions that are net negative
| and just ensure passing on the cost to others.
|
| But this isn't something that's gonna be stated outright so it
| largely remains within the head of the founder so the ideas that
| make the company work also remain within the head of the founder
| which is why they're essential for the company to tick.
| MailleQuiMaille wrote:
| Yup. Uber, Airbnb, Spotify...All these companies we glorify for
| essentially being a well polished middleman are like this. Glad
| someone else sees it like it is.
| marklubi wrote:
| Having started three companies, and got a successful exit on the
| third, the solution is to be opinionated
|
| I built what I wanted and needed. Directed things in the way I
| wanted them to go. Changed an entire industry.
|
| Don't let MBAs run your company, because they generally only care
| about the numbers, not about the product. If it's a good product,
| it sells itself.
|
| Edit: At one point, we brought in a CFO that kept on trying to
| insist we go another way (advertising.. you just keep chasing
| that). Maybe we would have made more money that way, but now the
| profit is at 4x expenses
| nine_zeros wrote:
| I disagree with a lot of things pg has said but this essay is
| SPOT ON.
|
| Manager mode is utter BS. MBA books and management coaching
| teaches people to occupy a higher position in the org chart and
| to define rules, bureaucracy, and measurement of whatever they
| are managing. Tech companies have a perverted form of this where
| IC track and manager track are separate - so managers are only
| defining rules, bureaucracy, and measurement of people - stack
| ranking them.
|
| Of course this method is flawed. We all inherently feel so. But
| no one asks why this is flawed. It is flawed because MBA-style
| box management is trying to impose boxes - which is orthogonal to
| innovation. Innovation literally means thinking/doing work
| outside the box.
|
| As an example, lets say that your 10 layers of management has
| hired a whole bunch of innovators but then said that they will be
| stack ranked against each other every 6 months based on criterias
| and hiring committees. This is a BOX - that is preventing ANY
| work that may require working OUTSIDE THE CONFINES OF THE BOX.
|
| Imagine a situation where a project is at 6 months performance
| review BOX boundary but still needs 2 weeks of slow rollout to
| ensure it doesn't crash on customers. In FOUNDER mode, the team
| is encouraged to take those 2 weeks to ensure that customers get
| a good experience - because it matters. In BOX management mode,
| these 2 weeks are going to appear as a fail for the stack rank
| committee gods. The nuance of the 2 weeks is lost. Instead, the
| management chain will ensure that the stack rank is executed
| perfectly - thus causing the people WHO CARED about the service
| and customers to depart - voluntarily or involuntarily.
|
| Ultimately, NO ONE is happy with the BOX management mode of work.
| Employees feel like their work and insight is undervalued,
| C-Suite is unhappy about causing customer issues, teams are
| unhappy because the BOX is hurting morale and causing sabotagey
| environments. The only people who seem to be ok with this is the
| 10 layers of BOX managers whose entire existence depends on
| perfect execution of the BOX.
| raghavankl wrote:
| From an execution perspective, I believe it makes more sense to
| start from the top down. Workers should believe that their boss
| is a boss because they can synthesize ideas.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| This whole article is written around one key sentence:
| > There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not
| doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.
|
| But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things
| actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5
| more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete.
|
| And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels
| like people are discussing Paul's new clothes without actually
| voicing out what they are talking about.
|
| What the hell is "Founder mode", exactly?
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| 1. Be the ultimate judge of what excellence means to the
| company. Enforce this directly, in direct communication with
| people doing both a good and a bad job, instead of rigidly
| relying on chain of command.
|
| 2. Break the rules if the rules are stupid. Pay excellent
| people out of band, for example.
|
| 3. Directly fire people for incompetence and accept that some
| of them will sue you. Whatever. Rather pay the settlement than
| pay the cultural cost of keeping losers around.
|
| 4. Don't accept that some things are too detailed for the CEO
| to understand. Either the person can explain it to you or you
| have the holy authority to overrule them.
|
| Ultimately, founder mode is about confidence, courage, and
| competence. It only works if you're good, and founders who are
| weak will obviously kill their companies if they try to do
| this.
|
| So act wisely.
|
| Edit: this is being downvoted, which I think proves the
| contrarian point PG is making.
| mlloyd wrote:
| > 2. Break the rules if the rules are stupid.
|
| This.
| nathanappere wrote:
| > Fix the rules if the rules are stupid"
|
| "Pay excellent people out of band, for example." why not
| fix the band ?
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| These are your personal essay points, not what was in the
| piece itself.
| antupis wrote:
| My ex colleague is still fuming after several years about case
| where professional manager decided to program parser that we
| decided was 8 story points. If this manager would have been
| founder it would probably have been normal stuff about founder
| spearheading initiative.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. He's talking about a management style in
| such a nebulous way, when I would imagine his experience and
| proximity to so many founders/companies could provide a little
| more concrete substance. This feels like a first draft, and
| should have "Dig deeper" written in red across the top
| kaplun wrote:
| A founder lives their company as the most important thing in
| their life, it's an extension of their life and they live and
| breath the company. A manager instead is being given a
| responsibility and will try their best to fulfill the role. A
| founder will never rest if they know there's an issue to be
| solved in the company, while the manager has a life and know
| they can move forward in case. A founder will not be
| intimidated by any internal policy or rule if they believe they
| need to change something. A manager will try to play by the
| rules, and in case try to modify them through influence. A
| founder is basically a ruler who truly care about the success
| of the company (not necessarily about the happiness and
| fulfilment of the people taking part in the company). For a
| funder the Company comes first, before anything else.
| bpmooch wrote:
| > A founder lives their company as the most important thing
| in their life, it's an extension of their life and they live
| and breath the company.
|
| i generally consider myself a hard worker and i have done
| plenty of overtime in my career. i would feel pity for anyone
| who felt this way about any company, unless they were
| literally curing cancer or giving us infinite energy.
|
| yuck
| ekanes wrote:
| Your comment doesn't seem to describe you in a founder
| role, because founders don't do overtime. Whether or not
| it's healthy, and it often comes with a price, the entire
| concept is there's no separation (at least in the early
| days) between them and the company. They embody the
| company. So they aren't working hard or doing overtime,
| they're doing "whatever it takes". The grandparent concept
| is alluding to this different.
| globalise83 wrote:
| At a purely financial level, making their company the most
| important thing in their life for a period of maybe 5-10
| years means that they have a good chance at not having to
| work at all for the rest of their life. Doing 5-10 years of
| overtime for someone else falls quite short of that in most
| cases.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| "... they have a good chance at not having to work at all
| for the rest of their life."
|
| We must have different expectations for the failure rate
| of startups.
| deepsun wrote:
| Still a lot of vague statements that different people can
| understand differently. Still no concrete examples.
| dmurray wrote:
| Based on pg's other work, I would guess that previous drafts of
| this essay had concrete examples, but they were removed after
| deciding that including them would make the discussion all
| about those specifics.
|
| But in general I think it's clear: founder mode here means
| having strong opinions about all parts of the company. Maybe
| it's a technical founder telling salespeople what they should
| emphasise in their sales pitches, or a nontechnical founder
| giving directions on choice of technical architecture. (And I
| think either of those examples would provoke different
| reactions in most people here).
| sowbug wrote:
| Is it possible this essay about founder mode is itself
| written in founder mode?
|
| Whatever the "it" is that constitutes a startup's purpose
| often can't be fully articulated in mission statements, OKRs,
| core values, etc. Either it's simply ineffable, or it's a
| metamorphosizing snapshot of the leading edge of a rapid
| process of discovery. Expecting such an already-abstruse
| concept to faithfully percolate down a rigid reporting chain
| is ridiculous, like sending old-English scrolls via carrier
| pigeon to narrate a live sporting event.
|
| But communication of the "it" still has to happen, if
| imperfectly. So someone in founder mode would naturally focus
| on delivering the most faithful and timely version of "it" to
| the points in the organization where it'll have the most
| impact and be least susceptible to corruption in transit.
| Today that might be to a UX engineer. Tomorrow it might be to
| the board. It's a kind of plate-spinning that aims to reduce
| skew from the latest version.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| You keep speaking of "it". I have had experience with "it".
| Sometimes it turns out that "It" is this very scary clown
| show that percolates down into the rest of the organization
| in a "cover your ass" mentality that is simply based on
| nothing but personal incentives to not be fired. "It" can
| indeed be percolated by clowns in the organization in this
| case.
| gist wrote:
| > I would guess that previous drafts of this essay had
| concrete examples
|
| It's always bothered me to no end that PG has his essays read
| by others prior to posting. This isn't academia (or an
| application to college or a job application) and he's not
| writing for a journal and requiring peer review (or comments
| or suggestions). Fine it's his own style apparently.
|
| Now what would be very interesting is to see some of the
| reply comments on the drafts of the PG essays (and how
| extensive they are).
| reagan83 wrote:
| I would argue that being a great operator (what he derides as
| manager mode) requires setting clear outputs and expectations
| from who you are delegating to. If your company turns to hell
| because you've delegated too hands off, that's a sign you
| aren't skilled enough at delegating. He calls this "founder
| mode" but this can be done by any highly skilled
| manager/operator.
| bjterry wrote:
| A founding CTO is more effective than a hired CTO, because the
| founding CTO has more moral authority to create a consistent
| system. In other companies there's infighting between people
| (senior engineers, senior managers) with different
| architectural preferences (e.g. microservices vs monoliths,
| Java vs Python). These senior people get half what they want,
| meaning half your system works one way and half the other. A
| CTO can hold to their singular vision.
|
| It could be that the moral authority stems from having as much
| of a full picture as a single person can have over the entire
| lifecycle of the company, but I think a lot is also just the
| effect of "I got you here."
|
| I'm glad pg named this effect, since I've talked about the
| related phenomenon for CTOs with many people.
| cj wrote:
| As our company scaled, 7-figure ARR, the common refrain was it
| was time we hire a VP of Sales to help make our sales process
| "repeatable, scalable, blah blah".
|
| So we tried twice over 3 years with 2 different VP's. Both paid
| $300-400k and sourced through recruiters who charged $75k in
| recruiter fees. So we were getting what any VC would consider
| cream of the crop VP of Sales.
|
| Yet both of them failed spectacularly. We went from closing
| business every month to (both times) sales stalling and flat
| lining.
|
| The 2 VP's were smart people and they had seen success at prior
| companies similar to ours in size and scale and maturity (and
| deal size, sales cycle length, B2B, etc). So what was the
| problem?
|
| Simply put, what worked at their prior companies didn't work at
| our company. And both of the VP's wanted to push us the
| founders as far away from the sales group as possible so the
| VP's could retain full autonomy with their team. Onboarding
| both VP's was a miserable experience because, both times, they
| clearly weren't interested in internalizing the hundreds of
| failed lessons (and success stories) that had gotten us to this
| point. So after a while we saw the whole sales team slide back
| into old behaviors and tactics that we as founders knew didn't
| work (because we'd already learned those lessons).
|
| By the time founders get to the point of bringing in outside
| management, they've probably been running the company for many
| years. The fatal problem is when founders bring in outside
| managers who don't bother to understand the tactics the
| founders used to get the company to the stage its at, and
| instead they come in wanting to replicate experiences they had
| a prior companies, because that's what's comfortable for them.
|
| Unfortunately, on the flip side, promoting from within isn't a
| much better option, either. I've seen it happen multiple times
| where extremely high performing IC's are promoted into Lead or
| Manager roles, and the company 1) immediately loses a high
| performer because they're now focussed on managing people which
| is usually a totally different skillset than whatever made them
| a high performing IC, and 2) the manager fizzles out after 1-2
| years because they aren't practiced at basic management tactics
| like delegation, quit, and go back to an IC position at another
| company.
|
| It's incredibly difficult to convert an IC into a manager. And
| it's also incredibly challenging to (successfully) bring in a
| manager who wasn't first an IC at your company.
|
| "Founder Mode" to me is figuring out how to scale your company
| in a way that doesn't lose the "magic sauce" that got the team
| to where it is. "Magic sauce" being culture, processes,
| systems, tactics, lessons, knowledge, etc that founders used to
| get the company to where it is before needing managers to scale
| people.
|
| "Founder led sales" ... "Founder led engineering" ... "Founder
| led marketing" are all dirty words when talking to VC's, PE,
| potential acquirers, because anything "Founder-led" isn't
| scalable and relies on the founder working at the company to
| work. Maybe "Founder mode" is a stage of a company where the
| focus is figuring out how to scale "Founder led X" beyond what
| has historically been seen as practical.
| gregcohn wrote:
| As someone who runs a company, this article resonated with me.
| This stuff happens in every department and has a lot to do with
| how the company is run day to day. If you think about the major
| deliverables of a department - and pick any department -
| "manager culture" says the head of that department produces the
| deliverable internally, getting feedback from stakeholders
| outside their team perhaps, but "owning" the decision. Thus the
| product roadmap is "owned" by the product team, and the person
| the VP PM or CPO reports to is a passive recipient of it even
| if they have input or feedback on it. But that cascades
| downward: in manager culture, the mobile roadmap is owned by
| the mobile PM, the internal tools roadmap is owned by the
| internal tools PM, and so on. They all buy into manager
| culture, where autonomy is viewed as a defining aspect of their
| impact and importance, and to take away that autonomy is to
| undermine them and risk losing them ("micromanaging, which is
| bad").
|
| This same thing happens with marketing. Budgets get set.
| Agencies get hired. Branding and creative campaigns get
| developed and show up on the doorstep of the CEO hundreds of
| thousands of dollars deep. In engineering. In customer support.
| In finance (we have to do this, because the forecast cycle
| requires it; we can't do that, because we don't have the
| budget).
|
| In founder culture, the founder gets down and dirty in the
| roadmapping process. They will give direct feedback on how a
| customer issue is routinely handled, or a design choice, or a
| creative campaign. Or a technical standard - Gates and Jobs
| both famously did this incisively and decisively. I'm no huge
| fan of Zuck, but it's clear how much involvement he has with
| product and design for example. He famously bought Instagram
| because he wanted to, and understood its importance to
| facebook's future, not because a strategy team identified it
| and a corp dev team engaged and investment banker to analyze
| and negotiate it. Mark Pincus was like this at Zynga too- ask
| anyone who was there.
|
| Why is this important? Because people all the way down the
| organization don't usually have the same nuanced understanding
| of the product, the market, the company strategy, the
| positioning, as you do. They will make decisions that optimize
| their subsystem but are sub optimal to the system. I had a
| customer support manager recently ask me if he could move a set
| of things that was causing a lot of load on his team to our law
| firm. The law firm of course charges 10-30xx per hour what a
| customer support agent makes. Even if you do a good job
| evangelizing the company mission and hiring non-mercenaries and
| whatnot, again and again and again you will see people wanting
| to "professionalize" their teams in ways that add more process,
| slow things down, and attenuate impact.
|
| So If you let your company get into manager mode, you really
| lose control of the boat. And if you try to operate in founder
| mode after hiring a bunch of managers, they pissed because they
| don't want to be micromanaged. But if they were crushing it,
| you wouldn't need to.
|
| I think the best founders are able to navigate this dynamic
| effectively, whether that's by being able to effectively make a
| jump to a more delegated model, or building a team that can
| leverage their strengths without snuffing their hands-on
| involvement, or taking back the wheel at the right time.
|
| A good counter example I can think of is Yahoo, when Jerry Yang
| took back over after Terry Semel retired. Manager culture had
| deeply set in there, and was not reversible despite Jerry's
| good efforts and some great executives who were aligned to it.
| (And yes, the big, Steve Jobs inspired, "fix the company
| retreat" they did was literally "VP's and up".). As someone who
| worked there, was not a VP, but likely would have been in a
| "top contributing employees" cull by different measures, it was
| extremely painful to experience.
|
| I would note that it takes a lot of energy to sustain this mode
| and be a leader through it, or to make changes in this
| direction to course correct.
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| Agree completely, this is an essay without a thesis, or any
| valuable evidence or argument. This is a C- college essay at
| best.
|
| I'm sad about that because I was very interested in the title.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| But, he's right.
|
| I'd rather a C- college essay that is saying something right
| than an A+ that is very convincing bs. A decent number of
| well rated business books are the latter.
| lnenad wrote:
| It's only "right" because you echo his thoughts. If it were
| written properly with examples and proper reasoning it
| would entice those who don't share his opinion to consider
| their stance.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It's too messy a topic for "proper reasoning". Take is as
| a viewpoint, not a law of physics.
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| As far as I can tell he's provided an empty vessel with a
| smart-sounding, but undefined term, and this entire thread
| is people projecting their beliefs into that vessel.
|
| Nearly none of these comments are grounded in his actual
| text.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Then don't believe it. It's not some water tight argument
| he's making, it's not "law of physics" right.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| I don't disagree with your criticism of his post, but to your
| question -- as best I can tell, "founder mode" means
| maintaining a high level of personal involvement in product
| design and decision-making, even as the company grows. Trusting
| and delegating tasks to specific individuals but retaining a
| hands-on approach.
|
| To some extent, the concept must remain vague because its
| meaning will vary from one company to another. Typically, there
| are one or two critical aspects that are most important for a
| startup or company, and the founder must be involved in those
| areas in a way that conflicts with the usual corporate
| structure or hierarchy.
|
| Anyways, this is how I understood it.
| pajeets wrote:
| Think this is the best answer. Founder mode should mean you
| have an unhealthy obsession with your product and vision.
|
| The best example I can think of is the Costco founder
| threatening the newly arrived CEO who complained they were
| losing money on the hot dogs.
|
| To me that is the single best example of Founder Mode.
| thomukas wrote:
| He was implicitly referring to what Chesky did recently at
| AirBnB (personal involvement in lower-level decisions eg
| product design in his case as it's his forte).
| FloorEgg wrote:
| I think Paul is pointing at something I've heard described as
| integrated complexity, basically someone who can hold the
| entire business in their head and understand how all the
| problems interact at all levels of abstractions. Not everyone
| can do this, but the people who can are better served if they
| exercise the ability because it improves alignment and
| accountability.
|
| When you assign a person to a problem (hr policy,
| infrastructure scaling, new UX capability) they will treat that
| problem as most important, and if then they break it down a
| certain way and delegate parts those people will do the same
| with their respective parts. Like a game of telephone
| eventually what's actually important and what people think is
| important will drift apart, and before you know it a lot of
| people are working and doing stuff that doesn't really matter
| or is even counter productive.
|
| A founder who can hold the whole business in their head and
| inspects the whole company at all levels continuously will spot
| and challenge/correct these drifts.
|
| I think it was from Creativity Inc I read that Steve Jobs would
| challenge engineers about things and if the engineer stood up
| to him and made their case and it made sense and fit into the
| vision Steve would commend them and give them the autonomy, at
| least for that decision/project, but if the engineer folded or
| couldn't make a case for why it was the right decision he would
| steamroll them.
|
| So I think founder mode is basically inspecting and challenging
| the company at all levels to maximize progress towards
| realizing a vision, and only people who are great visionaries
| and can also understand and judge the vision-alignment of
| unlimited micro decisions across many disciplines are able to
| operate this way.
| breck wrote:
| This is a killer comment. Thank you.
| lordofmoria wrote:
| Brilliant explanation - it puts into words and makes sense of
| some experiences I've had that are hard to articulate.
| ahaucnx wrote:
| I agree 100%.
|
| I would really underline the ability of the founder to have
| this pretty unique ability to see and set the strategic
| direction of the startup which requires a lot of abstract
| thinking with the tactical and operational skills to make
| sure you earn money right now.
| huevosabio wrote:
| This is a great explanation. It should be paired with the
| article.
|
| Thanks!
| figassis wrote:
| I run a payments startup, but to ktlo, I had to do consulting
| work, and I'd hired a sales person to acquire and manage
| clients. When I realized consulting was taking too much time
| and focus, I ended it. It took the better part of a year to
| get the sales person to stop finding more clients. They
| didn't get why I would end something that was generating
| revenue, and kept trying to talk me out of it with "this is
| such a great deal, it's a quick project, pays well, etc".
| Imagine this across all depts. This is how businesses lose
| focus, everyone thinks they just need to make their case.
| YZF wrote:
| This does resonate but I don't think it's necessarily a
| "founder" vs. "manager" thing. I've seen at least one company
| that was not successful under its founders and where a hired
| CEO took it to the next level. That hired CEO operated closer
| to what you'd call "founder mode". Both these companies grew
| to multi-billion dollar valuations and would have likely
| never gotten there without hiring a CEO and both executed
| really well by any measure.
|
| I've also seen founders that weren't really at a level where
| they could "founder mode" and micromanaged things badly.
| Those founders are the ones that tend to apply the bad advice
| pg discusses and who can't really tell the difference if
| they've hired a good or not so good person and whether
| they're doing a good job or not.
|
| I totally agree that you need people with the ability to hold
| the big picture in their head. This can be the entire company
| but it can also be one product or project within the company.
| Trying to construct this picture out of pieces in multiple
| people's heads is vastly inferior and is a factor in the
| failure of projects/products and companies. You can't
| separate vision/what/how across people.
|
| What I don't think we want to take away from this is that the
| founder is always right or that you shouldn't hire good
| people and let them do their job. I don't think these two
| statements are accurate. The "founder" (or manager) does need
| to make sure that things come together, i.e. you don't have
| engineers building the wrong things. But you do need good
| people and you do need to let them do their job.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| I agree that the labels Paul used already carry meaning
| that confuses what I think Paul is really trying to point
| out. I also agree that it's really hard to tell whether
| someone is capable of leading in "founder mode", and to
| what degree.
|
| Ray Dalio describes these people as "Shapers", and maybe
| using a new term is the right way to go.
|
| So putting this term to work, Paul's point is that the best
| way to run a company when the leader is a shaper isn't
| going to be the same as when the leader isn't a shaper. And
| to your point not all founders are Shapers and not all
| Shapers are founders.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It's making decisions, in the weeds, across functional
| boundaries and some form of micromanaging.
|
| He's right. I've worked in small and large companies and
| started one. The whole idea of hiring smart people and letting
| them do a good job is total nonsense. It doesn't even make
| sense in theory, let alone practice.
| capdiz wrote:
| https://x.com/paulg/status/1830300111232188626
|
| He does clarify, in the linked reply, that he didn't provide
| examples or go into detail about what exactly "founder mode" is
| or how it should be done because it needs a lot of research and
| would more or less require a whole book to explain.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I think it is obliquely getting at a difference between founder
| and manager that is very real: a founder has a moral authority
| over the vision that a manager does not. We can argue whence it
| comes but it is palpable from strong founder leaders. There is
| a general sense that they hold the entire business in their
| head.
|
| A founder can wield this to effect changes that would be nearly
| impossible without it. In this sense, a founder can solve some
| problems in every part of the organization that no manager can.
| If a founder delegates everything to managers, or cannot
| identify problems best addressed with this founder's tool, then
| you are setting up managers to be ineffective in some
| situations that could have been solved by the founder stepping
| in. I think this is also part of what makes founder-led
| companies different generally. Professional managers do not
| have this tool at their disposal to solve organizational
| problems.
|
| It requires judiciously picking when and where to leverage this
| power. Applying it unnecessarily will have the effect of
| disempowering your managers, and now you have a new
| organizational problem.
| cammil wrote:
| You hold the vision, so tell people whatever you want. That's
| my interpretation.
| narrator wrote:
| Jensen Huang of NVIDIA uses stochastic sampling instead of status
| reports[1]. Kind of sounds like the same thing. Dig deep
| stochastically into the organization. Also sounds like
| "management by walking around," which was the style at HP under
| Hewlett and Packard[2]. I think the reason professional managers
| dislike these methods is they lack technical understanding of
| what the business actually does and instead focus on the
| financial aspects.
|
| [1] https://www.apolloadvisor.com/unconventional-leadership-
| of-j...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around
| joehandzik wrote:
| I was gonna note how similar this looks to how Jensen operates
| - he also has something like 50 direct reports, in some ways
| removing the need for skip level interactions often.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Hi, exited founder here. I recently learned more about
| "uniqueness bias". And I'm so glad I did, because I now realise
| that (with all due respect to pg) this is what propels people,
| upon observing some trend/possible causation, to insist that they
| have "discovered" something powerful and unique, hey in this case
| let's call it "founder mode". Whereas the reality is that it's
| infinitely more likely that the world of business has, in fact,
| considered and evaluated various similar management techniques
| over the past few hundred years. I often find that the vast
| majority of these new "insights" are usually just common sense.
| slewis wrote:
| This 100% matches my experience.
|
| I like to jokingly call founder mode: "fine-grained multi-level
| oversight". Others might call it the derogatory
| "micromanagement".
|
| That doesn't mean I control every decision, or that I don't give
| people space to be creative. What it means is: for whatever is
| most important for the business, I get involved with the details.
| The goal is that when I move out of that area, the team I worked
| with is able to operate closer to founder mode than when I
| started.
|
| The issue is that vision fundamentally can't be communicated by
| telephone, or all at once. You're trying to get to a point on the
| map that most people can't see. The path to it is the integration
| of all of the tiny decisions everyone makes along the way.
|
| If you only course correct from the highest level you'll never
| get there.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| "Founder Mode" vs "Manager Mode" sounds like a false dichotomy
| the way it's discussed here.
|
| Would rather just never appeal to authority - whether founder or
| manager. Nobody knows anything. All you can do is present a case
| for trying X and try it - might work, might not, iterate on what
| does.
|
| Given that the environment is essentially "trying stuff", staff
| the team with good triers: People who can build, sell, and those
| who can manage releases and the day-to-day to keep people
| building and selling and managing the current thing.
|
| I worry that this post will inspire founders everywhere to start
| micromanaging worse than before. As an IC, what's worse - having
| a manager? Or having a micromanaging founder who plays the role
| of manager/dev/everything else?
| goatherders wrote:
| Eehhh... this overlooks the fact that a company not reaching its
| expected potential should, by default, change what it's doing.
| Suggesting that more startups could avoid failure by changing
| management style is true...and fairly obvious.
|
| Companies hiring the wrong team members may well be the bigger
| problem. Plenty of companies succeed by building great teams.
| Plenty fail by hiring the grifter class.
|
| I do agree that CEO/founders need to learn that being "in" the
| business is required longer than expected.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| When it comes to employees at every level; there seems to be two
| general attitudes that can make or break a company.
|
| 1) Those who try their very best to contribute more than they
| extract. They want to be compensated fairly to be sure; but they
| see their role as to bring value to the organization that is in
| excess to what they are paid in salary and benefits.
|
| 2) Those who want to extract as much as possible in return for as
| little value as they think they can get away with.
|
| These attitudes exist at all levels from the CEO down to the
| lowest contributor on the organization chart.
|
| Whether you use 'founder mode' or 'manager mode' to lead;
| building a culture that hires, keeps, and promotes the first type
| and tries to avoid the second, is critical.
|
| No company of any reasonable size can only have the first kind,
| but many an organization that should have been successful, will
| go under when the second kind becomes pervasive.
| dosinga wrote:
| This sort of glosses over that Jobs was pushed out of Apple for
| good reasons the first time around. His second coming was
| spectacular but Founder Mode Apple in the 90s would have crashed
| qorrect wrote:
| Was really hoping this would be a new major mode for Emacs.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after
| founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional
| fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
|
| Or maybe, smart engineers who found companies just aren't
| generally that good at hiring.
| aerospades wrote:
| George Hotz calls this "the button" on his last Lex podcast.
| <https://youtube.com/watch?v=dNrTrx42DGQ&t=5247>
|
| "This is Mark Zuckerberg reading that Paul Graham asking and
| being like, I'm going to show everyone how alive we are. I'm
| going to change the name [from Facebook to Meta]. Does Sundar
| Pichai have the authority to turn off google.com tomorrow? They
| have the technical power, but do they have the authority? Let's
| say Sundar Pichai made this his sole mission. He came into Google
| tomorrow and said, 'I'm going to shut google.com down.' I don't
| think you keep this position too long. Now, does Mark Zuckerberg
| have that button for facebook.com? I think he does. And this is
| exactly what I mean and why I bet on him so much more than I bet
| on Google."
| olalonde wrote:
| Maybe management style is just not that important compared to
| other factors, like product vision and strategy? Perhaps founders
| who are so good at those other things can lead companies to
| success in spite of mediocre management? That would explain the
| lack of consensus.
| malthaus wrote:
| hacker news glorifying paul graham for glorifying his startups
| with survivorship bias is getting really old
|
| there's different ways to success and it depends on a lot of
| factors you can't anticipate or control. ex-post rationalizing it
| and generalizing it into self-help / business book snippets of
| wisdom is laughable.
|
| this reminds me of the time where every middle manager suddenly
| thought being a steve jobs brand of asshole is the path to
| business success
| pphysch wrote:
| One of the first things that was emphasized in a recent
| "Management 101" seminar (taught by a HR grunt) was that
| effective "management" consists of 3 roles:
|
| - Management
|
| - Leadership
|
| - Coaching
|
| It seems that Graham wasn't aware of this and believes him and
| his buddies are the first to identify the latter roles, albeit as
| "Founder".
|
| It wouldn't surprise me that the sophistication of management
| theory in SV startup scene is so low. It seems that most startup-
| scale innovation in SV comes from talented ICs rather than well-
| managed projects. Isn't that the theory behind "startups" in the
| first place?
|
| The big tech players definitely have some genuinely excellent
| managers. It just hasn't trickled down to the YC level
| apparently.
| windowshopping wrote:
| "Thanks to...Elon Musk...for reading drafts of this."
|
| Good to know he's still held in high esteem by these people.
| bpm140 wrote:
| It's interesting that Graham doesn't seem to say what Founder
| Mode looks like in any capacity, other than referring to a few
| outlier founders.
|
| Less than one quarter of companies that go public do so with
| their original CEO.
|
| Most people would say that indicates Founder Mode doesn't
| generally work as companies scale.
|
| It looks like Graham feels that it's because too many founders
| listen to common wisdom and eventually get pushed out / leave?
|
| I honestly don't buy it. In order to scale, companies have to
| learn how to operationalize more and more processes. This
| fundamentally looks like "hiring people and giving them the space
| and authority to operate."
|
| I feel like his entire post could have been reframed as "just as
| VCs know there are relatively few excellent founders and
| identifying them is hard, there are similarly few excellent
| executives and identifying them is also hard."
| drewcoo wrote:
| What a crock.
|
| Most startups fail. So they commonly get advice about how not to
| fail. Most of them still fail. That doesn't mean the advice was
| bad. Founders are gamblers and the odds suck.
|
| If founders weren't looking for someone to tell them how to run
| their businesses or trying to rid themselves of their pesky
| responsibilities, this situation would be different. But that's a
| story that most founders don't want to hear.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Agree, and by extension would love to see a conversation
| between PG and Marc Randolph on the topic of startup advice. I
| can't tell if the two polar opposites or preaching essentially
| the same thing - both seem to say "take ideas with a grain of
| salt" but PG seems to exempt the founder, as if the founder and
| only the founder has some secret power to succeed no matter
| what - if only they go it alone.
|
| "The startup can build and extend, but the startup never
| invents anything. That preciousness lies in the lonely mind of
| a [founder]." -PG Steinbeck /s :D sorry
| bcantrill wrote:
| This is a good piece in that there is absolutely truth to it --
| but it's also a bit dangerously non-specific in that it
| potentially leaves founders with the notion that whatever they
| happen to think is tautologically correct. To supplement this
| piece, I would make three specific recommendations that I think
| tack into the same themes (namely: mistakes founders make --
| including trusting the wrong people at the wrong times), but with
| quite a bit more detail.
|
| First, Tim O'Reilly wrote a superlative piece in 2013, "How I
| Failed."[0] I cannot recommend this piece highly enough, and it
| had enormous impact on me as a founder. Its message is quite a
| bit more complicated than the Graham piece: there are times to
| stand your ground and resist conventional wisdom (HR in
| O'Reilly's piece), and there are times when expert practitioners
| of that conventional wisdom will save your bacon (the CFO in
| O'Reilly's piece). And the truth is more complicated still in
| that O'Reilly's specifics may or may not be the ones that a
| founder needs to apply to their own situation.
|
| Second -- and I recommend this whenever anyone mentions Jobs --
| is Randall Stross's "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing"[1], a
| history of NeXT written at Jobs' darkest hour. An extraordinary
| book that will leave you with a much more nuanced view of Jobs:
| not only in terms of his strengths (definitely those!) and his
| weaknesses (here in spades!) but especially the way that the NeXT
| experience surely informed Jobs's (much more successful) return
| to Apple. (It is a galling failure of the Issacson biography that
| he spends so little time on NeXT.) Selfishly, I would also
| recommend our _Oxide and Friends_ discussion of the book.[2]
|
| Third (and finally): a very common specific mistake that
| technical founders make is how they build out a go-to-market
| team. This isn't discussed nearly enough, and I was on a podcast
| episode of Software Misadventures ("Ditching the Rules to Build a
| Team that Lasts"[3]) with my own co-founder (who came up on the
| go-to-market side) in which he elaborates on this mistake -- and
| how founders can avoid it.
|
| [0] https://www.oreilly.com/radar/how-i-failed/
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316
|
| [2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-
| object...
|
| [3] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/oxide-ditching-the-rules
| mells7 wrote:
| _Unwarranted perspective from someone who is not a founder, but
| works with and has a lot of respect for them_
|
| I think the common thread between the two blogs is context and
| detail are important. I kind of think "Founder mode" is just
| doing your own diligence on your decisions rather than trusting
| heuristics or outside third parties. The "HR lawyers" or the
| "professional managers" are probably not nearly as tied to the
| company as the founder, and therefore unwilling to wade into
| the details and rely on such heuristics or "playbooks" for
| decision making or advice giving.
|
| Tim does raise a salient point though in that finance functions
| are often overlooked or under invested, and siloed division.
| The whole company probably does not need to know the daily cash
| balance of the company, but team members should maybe think a
| bit more carefully about relative rates of return on their
| invested time or money, and "finance" is a good framework for
| doing just that. The best CFOs (or people more generally) look
| for that context (and help others do so too), so they can
| understand intuitively the impacts of potential decisions.
| Meanwhile, the professional managers run away from the detail
| and prefer to rely on playbooks and heuristics like the
| Conjoined Triangles of Success.
|
| I don't think it always has to be that way though, you just
| need people to care enough to wade into the depths of detail
| and care as if they were a founder.
| drewcoo wrote:
| This "Founder Mode" seems more like "Victim Mode" looking for
| someone to blame.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That sounds like you maybe read the post with a very
| preconceived idea. I didn't see anything there that seemed like
| "looking for someone to blame".
| lawrence1 wrote:
| smh. his idea that he both doesn't think anyone has ever thought
| of "Founder Mode" before while simultaneously thinking that the
| founders are the ones responsible for a company's success or
| failure through something like sheer force of will or a better
| carrot and stick. I donno. Companies are successful mostly
| because of who they hire... and timing (also known as luck).
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The take away is don't blindly follow a certain style, there
| really isn't a template for success which is often completely
| diffufor each person/team/culture/business model combination
| alberth wrote:
| I think people are conflating "founder mode" with "founder led".
|
| Those are two very different things.
|
| Look to Oracle as an example of a "founder mode" company that is
| not founder led.
| labbett wrote:
| Reminds me of most small businesses.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| After dumping on a lot of pg's recent essays that I found to be
| quite myopic, I really liked this one and thought it was
| insightful.
|
| I am curious, though, if anyone knows some more of the specifics
| that Chesky shared about the "disasters" that resulted from the
| bad advice he followed in the past. I ask because I've seen two
| bad, but very different, scenarios:
|
| 1. One is to hire really smart people and just "let them loose",
| but without overarching guidance or direction. While I got burned
| by this model in a past job in my own career, I think a good
| well-known example of this currently is Google's "WTFs" around
| product management, i.e. lots of products launching with fanfare
| then get killed shortly thereafter, bizarre and confusing product
| naming schemes (Google Wallet/Android Wallet/GPay/Google Pay
| anyone? I honestly don't even remember), new product launches but
| then old, easily fixable bugs/feature requests that languish for
| years.
|
| 2. The other model, which is more of what PG seems to be hinting
| at, is the "John Sculley" model, i.e. treating employees like to
| interchangeable widgets, thinking of your org structure as black
| boxes with only specific interface points, etc.
|
| That is, I've seen both of these models fail, but in very
| different ways, so I'm curious what happened at AirBnB.
| varispeed wrote:
| Is there a point to this article? It sounds like waffle.
| tompetry wrote:
| I've thought about this topic a lot before. The concept of a
| founder vs manager "mode" doesn't resonate with me, but the
| message boils down to this: founders have more freedom to approve
| high risk/high reward initiatives, while shielding everybody else
| on downside. It's "their company" and their job can stomach some
| turmoil in the name of winning.
|
| Managers don't have this safety net; failures will be evaluated
| more critically and they probably aren't the types to win at all
| costs. So they are more focused on avoiding fatal mistakes that
| will lose them their jobs, but don't end up achieving as much on
| average.
|
| In a sports analogy, founders play to win and managers play not
| to lose.
|
| But it's a spectrum not black and white. Every founder has to
| delegate and every founder has to bring on great people to do the
| work and let them breathe. I think its about freely enabling bold
| projects while minimizing the fear and anxiety at all levels, and
| figuring out the decision making and execution structure that
| works the best.
| codingdave wrote:
| > what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers
|
| Yep, that is the key problem.
|
| "Hire good people..." is good advice. If it is failing for so
| many startups, then the quote above is what is really going on --
| startups are failing to hire good people. If they had been
| succeeding, the advice would have worked. What should be getting
| asked is how to identify what "good" is for a specific founder's
| vision. It won't be the same "good" as the next person, and
| definitely not the same "good" as larger corporations with
| different histories.
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| PG wrote:
|
| "Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's
| going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the
| company only via his or her direct reports."
|
| Whatever happened to "Management by Wandering Around"? Usually
| credited to HP but Shakespeare had Henry V do it (see act 4 scene
| 1) and there are probably even earlier examples.
| seagullriffic wrote:
| > At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone
| who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward
| said it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first
| time in his life, forgot to take notes.
|
| Is there a recording? It's very frustrating to read things like
| this and not be given a link.
| nlh wrote:
| Disclaimer: I am NOT a big company guy, and I generally fight
| tooth-and-nail against the enshittification that happens when
| startups grow beyond a certain point, so I've got a bias here.
|
| I think, for once, pg is dead-on with this post, and I'm glad
| it's being brought to light. Too many managers and founders live
| in fear of the dreaded "micromanager" label and stand back and
| watch their companies turn to crap.
|
| The thing is - if you have a vision for what's needed to make
| your product or company truly successful and the people working
| for you aren't hitting the mark, you have to get in the trenches
| and make it work.
|
| Here's the dreaded scenario:
|
| Your company is working on a new product (or a new version or
| whatever) and you, the stalwart CEO, have left it to your team to
| build without getting too into the mix lest you be labeled a
| micromanager. It's not going in the right direction and for
| whatever reason it's not hitting the mark.
|
| Do you have the cajones to tell the team to go back to the
| drawing board, even if your delegated manager thinks it's going
| well? The launch will be late, the team will be annoyed ("Damn
| that CEO getting into our business again"). I bet a lot of CEOs
| don't, and this is why companies turn to crap over time. pg's
| point here is that the CEO needs to be willing to think like a
| startup CEO and be willing to go into founder mode and get his or
| her hands dirty to make sure the product nails it.
|
| This is hard but necessary!
| gist wrote:
| > Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good
| people and give them room to do their jobs."
|
| What's the definition of 'good people' in the sense that nobody
| knowingly hires 'bad' people. And to my other points (below) how
| is someone with (very very generally) no actual business
| experience (or very little ie in or out of college) supposed to
| know if someone is good (or just faking it even with embelished
| references) if they don't themselves have an idea of what 'good'
| is? (Also how well they are able to read people.
|
| > You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to
| figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what
| they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
|
| If you are a startup founder typically you wouldn't be able to
| anyway because a) You don't know their job and b) You actually
| don't know that much about business (or operating one) to begin
| with.
|
| > judging from the report of founder after founder, what this
| often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them
| dr ive the company into the ground.
|
| To my first point because they don't know enough don't have
| enough actual experience to even know how to vet someone. Welcome
| to the business world where actual time in business does make a
| difference.
|
| > Steve presumably wouldn't have kept having these retreats if
| they didn't work. But I've never heard of another company doing
| this.
|
| While Steve might have had other reasons for keeping the retreats
| the fact that PG has never heard of another company doing it
| could just be because Paul only reads what he reads AND not every
| company talks about things they do in a public way.
| voiceblue wrote:
| There is no such thing as "conventional wisdom". Wisdom will
| guide you to treat convention not as instruction, but as input -
| one of many.
|
| PG did not go far enough here. The problem isn't 'bad advice',
| the problem is that advice is no substitute for thinking. Neither
| is looking at what Steve Jobs did at Apple for that matter: what
| really works is to _think_ about all of this, considering
| problems from multiple angles.
|
| However, as Bertrand Russel said:
|
| "Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!"
|
| Which also applies to businesses! Indeed,
| another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that once we
| figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual
| founders were already most of the way there -- except that in
| doing what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or
| worse.
|
| Based on that quote, here's my attempt to define 'founder mode'
| in terms of what TFA is suggesting: be an independent thinker.
| Does it sound like common sense? It probably is. But remember
| what Charles Munger said: The so-called common
| sense is common sense that ordinary people do not have. When we
| say that someone has common sense, we are actually saying that he
| has common sense that ordinary people do not have. People think
| that it is easy to have common sense, but in fact it is very
| difficult.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| This just sounds like PG overly fixating on "founder" vs
| "manager" as the distinction, when the actual focus should be on
| relative skills of delegation vs skills in the business domain.
|
| Whether or not you are a founder, if your strengths tend toward
| understanding the business domain and implementation, then you
| probably should lean more hands on. If your strengths lean more
| towards the management side, then hiring strong people to manage
| parts of the company.
|
| Of course, which works better is very company and culture
| dependent. Larger conglomerates that don't have a focused mission
| probably shouldn't have leaders that aren't geared toward that.
| tappio wrote:
| All is see here is that finding good people is difficult?
|
| Being C level exec in another firm does not guarantee success. In
| fact, it might even be a dismerit for a startup.
| gniting wrote:
| Anyone know why PG still insists on having his posts be in a
| format where readability seems to be the least important thing? I
| am sure there's a solid/sound reason, and I am genuinely curious
| to understand it.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| "Bookish" I kinda like it
| jcims wrote:
| This kind of thing is true outside the context of the head of a
| company.
|
| I've worked for mid-level leadership in large companies (maybe
| 1,000 people reporting to them) that basically just cast spells
| and hope the magic gets done by the people on the ground. I've
| also worked for leadership at the same level that invests time
| every month to have skip level conversations 2-3 levels removed
| in the org chart. There is a material difference, in my
| experience, in the timeliness and consistency of how things get
| executed in the latter.
|
| Micro-management isn't always the worst thing. Sometimes it's
| necessary.
| jshchnz wrote:
| Cue to every founder writing tweets like "aCtuAlLy I waS In
| foUnDer mOdE tHe wHoLe TiMe"
|
| _screenshots /links to new paul graham essay_
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| The micromanaging is about to get insane (it already is)
| daemonk wrote:
| As an exited founder who left 2 years after acquisition, this
| really put into words thoughts that I've had leading up to me
| leaving.
|
| Founders can sometimes be walking contradictions of being hyper
| self critical and also have supreme confidence. Going from a 50
| employee startup to being a part of a multinational corporation
| is a "corporate shock" that makes a founder think they are out of
| their depths and should just follow the corporate's lead.
|
| The founder vs manager mode definitely resonates with me.
| However, the lack of concrete success stories of "founder mode"
| (whatever that may mean) leads to most founders giving up their
| reigns to the horde of corporate MBAs and quietly quitting after
| their holdback period is over.
|
| Why exert so much effort trying to paddle a canoe and steering
| against the giant cruiseship that is the mothership corporation,
| when you should just go start another company and reap your
| potential reward.
| api wrote:
| > "Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after
| founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional
| fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."
|
| To me this points to a secondary problem further down the line in
| hiring. Why are you getting a bunch of professional fakers?
|
| Maybe in hiring people (including founders) tend to look at a lot
| of secondary indicators: where the person went to school, past
| companies they've worked for, etc. Instead they should be looking
| at primary indicators around how they have actually done or might
| actually do the job. That is _much_ harder to evaluate though,
| which is why people fall back to secondary indicators.
| 7e wrote:
| More ad hoc anecdata disguised as sage wisdom in order to get
| founders to give YC valuable equity for peanuts. This cargo-cult
| superstition wrapped as advice is really hard to stomach.
|
| Life is random, there are no unconditional rules for success in
| competitive spaces. Discretion is always key. Sometimes luck
| plays a role: PG's silly LISP startup as a prime example.
| gregfjohnson wrote:
| I grew up seeing founder mode first-hand. My dad founded
| Celestron, and he operated just as Paul is describing. At my
| current company, I see the CEO doing the exact same thing, which
| gives me great hope. Huge contrast from my previous start-up, for
| which I have great anti-hope unfortunately. (Current company is
| Zap Surgical Systems, with Dr. John Adler as the founder.) I've
| seen John everywhere, all day every day. I've seen him literally
| on his hands and knees under our robotic treatment table back in
| the engineering lab, discussing details with a young mechanical
| engineer. And yeah, we are curing cancer ;-)
|
| To re-iterate: What I believe PaulG is saying is that there is a
| crucially important phenomenon that we don't yet understand, and
| naming it will facilitate the process of bringing it into focus
| so that we can help more companies be successful.
|
| His footnote has a painful resonance: "I also have another less
| optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode
| becomes established, people will start misusing it."
|
| This is exactly what has happened to the Agile methodology.
| cwillu wrote:
| "The tao that can be named is not the eternal tao"
| ozim wrote:
| I don't think it is a bad outcome with misusing a concept.
|
| Because it does not affect those truly embracing it.
|
| Having an excuse is not going to save bad business run by bad
| people. It might let them slide a bit more but ultimately it is
| not doing the job for them.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| But it does make it more difficult to talk about a concept
| when it's been (re)defined and argued about and gaslit about
| instead of what PaulG is doing: providing a simple definition
| backed by some real-world examples that _actually_ are
| founder-mode being done more or less right.
| dheera wrote:
| The real problem with methodologies like "agile" or whatever
| the hell is that:
|
| - they are not magic solutions to a fundamentally flawed
| business, or a business that is building the wrong thing
|
| - they are not solutions to people issues
|
| To a great degree if you have the right business and people
| treat each other like humans, you don't need a methodology,
| just keep doing whatever you are doing.
| portn0y wrote:
| That crucial thing was probably being lucky enough to be born
| 50 years ago before all the low hanging work we take for
| granted had been done.
| fakedang wrote:
| > His footnote has a painful resonance: "I also have another
| less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder
| mode becomes established, people will start misusing it."
|
| Exactly what happened with Product Market Fit. With the current
| AI buzz, I see everyone and their nana preaching about how
| their product has PMF. If you had PMF, you'd have onboarding
| teams, not sales teams.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I don't believe it is that mysterious or revolutionary. What PG
| is describing is the "optimization of local maximum" problem.
|
| Founders focus on the strategic goal. Managers focus on
| tactical goals. Rules and processes are put in place to
| efficiently achieve these tactical goals. The problem is, in
| certain situations, these local process are at odds with the
| broader goal. Only the Founder has the authority to break the
| bureaucratic rules.
|
| My favorite example is from the film Zulu when the British
| quartermaster adamantly dispenses ammo per the rule book and a
| long queue of desperate soldiers form up. Nevermind the British
| were out numbered 10 or 20 to 1 and should be firing their
| rifles as quickly as possible and using up all their ammo as
| quickly as possible.
|
| https://youtu.be/8xjCX_TXkyU
| p1necone wrote:
| I think the general issue here is that you can't observe
| successful businesses or individuals and copy their processes
| to be successful, because their processes are largely a
| _symptom_ of their competency, not the cause.
| malfist wrote:
| Your Dad founded Celestron? That's crazy. I use an edgehd for
| all my astrophotography. It's a damn fine instrument.
| kqr2 wrote:
| Is Brian Chesky's talk available online?
| bogdan-lab wrote:
| This is what I understood from this article:
|
| Manger mode is "hire good people and give them space to do their
| job". Founders mode is Steve Job's way "<same as manager mode> +
| make those good people feel important".
|
| There are many founders, who failed to scale their sturtups,
| because they did something wrong. But it is not because they ALL
| in fact did the same mistake. It is just many of them can match
| their particular mistake with the vague concept of "bad manager
| mode advice".
| vajrabum wrote:
| This fits with most of Warren Buffet's acquisition practice in
| the last 40 or so years. He switched (mostly) from buying stocks
| and securities to buying highly profitable, privately held
| companies with good management in place and doing everything he
| could to keep them in place. And I remember research from a
| Stanford business professor about 20 years ago that family run
| companies on the S&P 500 significantly outperform ones with
| 'professional management'. Both could just be as simple as the
| management incentives are aligned with the long term health of
| the companies.
| tgtweak wrote:
| You do need to hire great people and give them room - but that
| doesn't mean you ignore them and let them operate their business
| unit like a separate organization... You need to be involved as a
| CEO or other key decision maker.
|
| This philosophy of involvement follows through the entire org
| structure not just from CEO to the farthest position down the org
| tree.
|
| Let's not let this be a rug to sweep poorly-behaving founders
| behavior's under, as there are plenty of those out there (key:
| successful founders).
| jll29 wrote:
| The brain tells the finger what to do (press 'r' to reply to
| email).
|
| But the brain does not walk down and presses the 'r' key
| itself, that would make the finger redundant, and it would be a
| distraction for the brain. The brain also doesn't talk to the
| finger and tell it how to move to the 'r' key step by step, as
| that would be micro-management and piss the finger off.
|
| What the brain needs to do is to enthuse the finger so that the
| finger acts in a way the brain would have acted - the "finger
| as the extended brain".
|
| Now a good leader can manage to enthuse not just one finger,
| but 20 "fingers" - and all their transitive reports. (No wonder
| successful biz leaders are similar to cult/sect gurus that can
| seem to distort reality.)
| campbel wrote:
| If you want to scale out, you need to have other be responsible
| for chunks of the operation. And they won't be responsible
| unless they have autonomy. This doesn't mean 100% free reign,
| but it does mean giving up a certain amount of control.
| tgtweak wrote:
| "trust but verify" goes a long way here, and simple
| management techniques like goal set and review (OKRs, etc)
| address the "professional fakers" issue - ironically one of
| the first things you should learn in formal management.
|
| As a founder and later a C suite exec - you really can't make
| this black and white. As a founder there is no greater
| feeling than hiring someone and finding out they can do a
| subset (ideally a large subset) of your tasks better and more
| efficiently than you. What you can not/should not do is walk
| away from that area of the business and never look back. You
| should still be invested and collaborative. A creative
| founder that can think from first principles should be able
| to contribute positively to any level of initiative even when
| they are not the most experienced person in the room. They
| should also be able to convey why an idea should buck
| convention and understand the consequences of it from the
| domain experts they hired.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds
| great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in
| practice, judging from the report of founder after founder,
| what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers
| and let them drive the company into the ground.
|
| Not to be that guy but if you're hiring fakers than you're not
| hiring good people to do their jobs.
|
| The reason why you can't hire good people is because they don't
| care about money, and from what I've seen bringing money into
| the equation actively drives them away.
|
| This is not something that a company like YC wants to hear
| because it means that their whole raison d'etre is flawed. I'm
| willing to bet that if the Paul Graham who wrote On Lisp met
| the Paul Graham who wrote this article, he would have some
| pointed questions about what went so spectacularly wrong in his
| career that he sold out so completely.
|
| God knows that the me from 10 years ago would have similar
| questions and he'd be deeply unhappy about the answers.
| punnerud wrote:
| I like the fact that Elon Musk read the draft... (credit at the
| end)
|
| Probably a great example of founder mode?
| bikamonki wrote:
| A friend bootstrapped his fastfood tiny chain to 5 locations and
| a couple of mill in revenue in two years. Low financial leverage,
| happy customers.
|
| An expert told him to hire experts to keep growing it. Now he's
| down to two locations, high in debt and uncertainty.
|
| Corpo bois are not founders, they know nothing of growing a
| startup. The have never produced value from thin air. They are
| just good at playing the corpo role. Job security is their main
| concern.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| What did they do that was so bad that it cost him 3 locations?
| portn0y wrote:
| Probably load up on financing to expand. Expansion floundered
| and they had to unload unprofitable and profitable locations
| to cover the debt.
| computerdork wrote:
| Am also wondering if part of the problem might have been
| timing. Did have 5 locations during the pandemic?
| computerdork wrote:
| ... although, having said that, the financing thing that
| another commentor mentioned I've read is often a problem of
| over expansion.
| sam345 wrote:
| Interview with Chesky. Talks about this around -57
| https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-...
| lhh wrote:
| Disappointed that Nigel Pennypinch is missing from the
| acknowledgements.
| Animats wrote:
| Much of this hinges on what the company does.
|
| AirBnB is basically a web site and a customer service operation.
| They don't own or run hotels.
|
| Netflix started like that, but now they also create content. The
| web site part is basically operating a server farm with a halfway
| decent interface. The negotiation with content providers part is
| crucial to success. Netflix also creates content. That works more
| like a VC operation.
|
| Movie making is interesting as a management problem. Strip away
| all the glitz, and it's a project business where a new team is
| formed for each project, they do a complicated one-off, and then
| disband. This works partly because of standardized roles and
| tasks. Sometimes it doesn't work, and whoever's funding the thing
| has to be funded for failures.
|
| These are all industries where the question of what to do
| dominates the mechanics of doing it. Compare, say, a railroad, an
| auto company, or an aircraft company, where ongoing execution
| dominates. YC tends not to fund that type of company.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| > an auto company, or an aircraft company,
|
| In both we are seeing how professional management can decimate
| a company with several decades of history. e.g Boeing.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > professional management
|
| Management incentivised to grow stock market value. look, if
| the incentives are wrong then you get distortions. A good
| example with "founders" is wework.
|
| Wework's innovation was two fold:
|
| zeroth) vast funding
|
| one) run the company like a mystery cult
|
| two) Have beer in a shared office
|
| Everything else is exactly what a shared office company does.
| WeWork's entire incentive was to grow as fast as possible and
| get as many customers as possible. No one cared about
| business fundamentals, because WeWork wasn't a buisness. It
| was a commodity to be traded by softbank.
|
| Buisness fundamentals have been royally fucked by changes in
| finance. Stock buybacks, limp monopoly actions, toothless
| market regulation, have all meant that profit is one thing,
| but share price is everything.
|
| The capitalism that made boeing et al is not the capitalism
| that we live in now.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Netflix started like that_
|
| Netflix started as a disk distribution company.
| richardw wrote:
| I think the term is simply ownership. You choose what to own, and
| often good founders (and honestly managers) own anything that is
| important. There's no "delegate and go home", there's "trust, but
| verify" and when verification fails, you get involved. You also
| own the failures. There is no CYA, there is only do.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| Somebody here commented long ago about Bill Gate's style of
| management which reminds me of this piece. If you presented
| something to BG he would start asking questions and get deeper
| and deeper. He was merciless. It seemed that he was just making
| sure that you knew what you were doing. So your really had to be
| prepared. Someone as knowledgeable and smart as BG was able to
| keep the Bull shitters out of the development org.
|
| I think what I am remembering is this story from Joel Spolsky.
| Good read. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-
| billg-rev...
| crop_rotation wrote:
| The funny thing is at one point the bureaucracy becomes so big
| that even BillG shouting couldn't get anything done. One great
| example is his mail on Movie Maker being dysfunctional and in
| response several VPs playing musical chairs saying not my
| problem. Once you hire enough of them, there is no way out.
| BillG might care about Movie Maker but a random VP cares about
| his own fiefdom.
|
| https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...
| nektro wrote:
| paul finally added https to his site. woohoo!!
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I'm at a loss as to how this is getting so many upvotes. A
| typical hierarchy is bad because you keep hiring "professional
| fakers"? I don't know...maybe work on that? The hierarchical
| structure is key to the most powerful companies, organizations,
| militaries and governments on earth. But the guy who ran AirBNB
| was bad at hiring so now we can reject all of that.
|
| No. The hierarchy works. There are two key things most managers
| miss. Learn the skill of hiring and firing well and (perhaps more
| importantly) incentivize them properly.
| maayank wrote:
| How to fire well?
| openrisk wrote:
| There better be a "founder mode" because "manager mode" is just a
| proxy for a firm that is run by lawyers, accountants, consultants
| and bankers. Sharp operators all of them, but none of them cares
| one iota what the organization actually does.
|
| Management of an enterprize (in general) aims to identify and
| exercise available options for "creating value" - in whatever
| terms that is measured. This "options space" is vast and founders
| versus managers are intimate with very different subsets.
| jonathonende wrote:
| Link to Chesky speech? Video or transcript?
| markerbrod wrote:
| Does anyone know if the talk by Brian Chesk was recorded?
| baxtr wrote:
| I think this is a classical case of survivorship bias.
|
| What about all those companies operating in founder mode that
| ended up being a disaster? What about all other companies that
| transitioned away from founder mode and worked even better
| afterwards? Both categories are conveniently neglected.
|
| Take Apple for example.
|
| Steve Jobs is mentioned 3 times in the essay. He seems to be the
| main prototype for a CEO in founder mode for pg.
|
| Yet, in the book _Steve Jobs_ by Walter Isaacson, Jobs is quoted
| as saying:
|
| _" I am very proud of the many products we have created, but the
| thing I am most proud of is creating the company that was able to
| create the products. I think of Apple as the most important work
| of my life."_
|
| This statement reflects Jobs' belief that the culture and company
| he built at Apple were his greatest achievements, as they allowed
| for continuous innovation long after any single product launch.
| And long after his death Apple is still thriving.
|
| So is Apple still in founder mode with Jobs gone or is Apple in a
| different mode that pg hasn't recognized?
| Flop7331 wrote:
| I think this is one of those cases where there's really very
| little way of knowing what really worked and what didn't. It's
| like a sports team: you can make _ALL_ the right managerial
| choices, but still fail due to chance and factors outside your
| control.
|
| At best there are some reasonably good heuristics.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| "I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the
| concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start
| misusing it."
|
| I have knowledge of how management worked in a Musk company, and
| this "Mini Me" phenomenon was entirely real. People saw how Elon
| did things, and tried to emulate him at their level. This almost
| always crushed team dynamics, and led to the least technically
| capable making important technical decisions.
|
| Elon (eventually) recognizes bs like this and makes those folks
| walk the plank; but... the damage is done, and must be un-done.
| There is a cost to allowing "Mini Me"s outsized influence.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I think in the US we are increasingly suffering from
| credentialism. I think acquiring credentials and appearing to be
| the best possible person is more game-able than it was previously
| thought to be. I think Goodhart's Law is becoming apparent. I
| think credentials could be meaningful but that a lot of people
| exist just to occupy prestigious space and time but who do not
| add value. It seems like we're unwilling to admit this could
| happen.
| smeej wrote:
| Isn't this really just "actually a startup" mode vs. "a growing,
| professionalizing company" mode?
|
| This footnote was what got me: > [1] The more diplomatic way of
| phrasing this statement would be to say that experienced C-level
| execs are often very skilled at managing up. And I don't think
| anyone with knowledge of this world would dispute that.
|
| I've not founded startups. I just work in them. I'm not even a
| terribly important worker. AI bots are absolutely coming for my
| job.
|
| But this is when I know a company has left "actually a startup"
| mode in the way that I can enjoy it and thrive in it, and when
| it's transitioned to "a growing, professionalizing company" mode,
| in which I wish them the best, but GTFO because I hate working in
| companies like that:
|
| As soon as there are three layers of management between me and
| the CEO, all of whose roles primarily require them to prove that
| they are somehow "managing" my work, even though they don't have
| the first clue how to _do_ my work, the company isn 't in its
| startup stage anymore. It's a whole different kind of company,
| and not one I choose to stay in. I just go find somewhere else to
| help get to that stage.
|
| "Professional managers" and "startups" are incompatible. Startups
| have to be able to move and pivot so fast that there's no use for
| a "manager" who doesn't actually know how to do the work of those
| they manage. They're going to be called on to fill in for those
| people far too frequently. They're dead weight if _all_ they know
| how to do is "manage."
|
| There is eventually a stage when you want those people, but
| trying to move to it too early, around your C or D when the VCs
| are telling you that you should, is fatal. Everyone who made the
| existing thing good is going to get crowded out by sycophants who
| don't have the deep cultural knowledge of and commitment to your
| product. All they know how to do is blow smoke up the right
| skirts at the right times.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I disagree with PGs take away, and would love to hear the talk to
| find out if I'm the one who is wrong.
|
| "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." is not
| orthogonal to running your start-up as a founder...or is it, and
| I'm doing it wrong?
|
| I'd love to understand where someone like Satya Nadella would fit
| into this example. He isn't the founder, but he runs the company
| as if he is, doesn't he? So "founder" isn't the correct
| description.
|
| I hope a link to the talk is made public, so we can decode what
| Brian is saying for ourselves.
| goatmanbah wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy I think...
|
| The difference in this case between a "founder" and a "manager"
| is more about understanding the nuts and bolts of the business
| and being able to lean on that understanding in ways that require
| you to cut through the org chart.
|
| Is it surprising that leaders who don't understand a business and
| aren't willing to engage across the full depth/breadth of the
| business are less effective than those that try to treat
| everything as an abstract cashflow machine?
| silverlake wrote:
| Professional managers (aka not the founder, climbed up the
| corporate ladder the old fashioned way): Tim Cook (apple), Satya
| Nadella (msft), Sundar Pichai (Google), Arvind Krishna (ibm),
| Shantanu Narayen (adobe), Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), Lisa Su (amd)
| and on and on. Just scan the Fortune 500 for tech companies and
| it's nearly all professional managers. The YC audience could have
| debunked this Founder Mode nonsense in just 10 minutes on
| Wikipedia, as I did.
|
| Most professional managers are BS artists. Perhaps Chesky hired
| of bunch of those. The conclusion is not to run everything
| yourself, but maybe hire better managers.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| I think it's still undecided if Airbnb is a force for good or a
| force for evil in the world.
|
| A lot, I mean a lot of people with middle incomes have bought
| desirable homes in nice locations and rent them out. There are
| many aspiring families, young couples priced out of the market
| because of this.
|
| Sure, this option was always a thing but the people who rent
| these properties out do not improve the community or unit they
| purchased and they rent out to anyone. This weekend a Airbnb
| guest kicked my door front door open. I pulled a gun on him and
| he apologized and said he was messing around but I wouldn't have
| to deal with this if I didn't live near short term rentals.
|
| Hotels needed a check to their power but I'm not sure if 15 years
| from now Airbnb will have been good for the median person. It
| sure helps the wealthy however.
| Flop7331 wrote:
| > kicked my door front door open
|
| What the hell kind of messing around is that? Did he think he
| was at the unit he rented that came with door-kicking
| privileges?
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