[HN Gopher] Founder Mode
___________________________________________________________________
Founder Mode
Author : bifftastic
Score : 1200 points
Date : 2024-09-01 07:35 UTC (1 days 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?
| herpdyderp wrote:
| Also, some of those most capable people don't have the
| desire or means to risk entrepreneurship.
| kragen wrote:
| pubmed centrals? politico-media complexes?
| guccii wrote:
| professional managerial class
| kragen wrote:
| aha, thanks
| 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.
| sevensor wrote:
| > the standard way businesses are run filters out the most
| capable and most effective people from executive positions
|
| You say this like it's not the intended outcome? If you have
| money, do you really want to invest in a high variance strategy
| that relies on a genius pulling rabbits out of a hat? Or do you
| invest in a sure thing? MBAs are very reliable at extracting
| value from successful firms. The continued success of the
| enterprise is a non goal. Same exact thing with Scrum. You have
| value locked up in some innovative software? Run Scrum on it
| for a few quarters until the juice is all sucked out, then move
| on, having reliably delivered features right up until the
| wheels fell off. It's not about value creation, it's about
| value extraction. Different game, different rules.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Seniority trumps ability.
|
| This is great, pithy phrase. Thank you to share it. Where I
| work, when I look up the ranks (always, always "old" people), I
| feel like many of these people could just stop coming to work,
| and I would not notice for weeks or months. "Zero fucks given"
| to anyone below them, unless it is ticking a box for their
| year-end review. Does anyone else feel this way?
| 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.
| heed wrote:
| the way i'm thinking about it: could apple be the size it
| is today, in terms of market cap and or influence, being
| strictly ran in "founder mode"? i'm even skeptical steve
| jobs could have taken it here.
|
| that's not to say the goal should always be to scale or
| become as big as possible, but it's interesting to think
| about.
| philwelch wrote:
| The actual scope of what Steve Jobs would be doing if he
| were still alive and serving as CEO today doesn't seem
| like it would be much more than it was when he was alive
| though.
| 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?
| esafak wrote:
| Because you don't want your company to fail because you
| failed to scale while your business was growing? What a
| terrible reason to fail; that's an own goal.
| lopatin wrote:
| For it to be a paradigm shift, there would have to be some
| definition of the new paradigm in the article, but it really
| only describes what it's not (regular management). Will go out
| on a limb and say that this seems to be a little bit of self-
| indulgence by successful people.
| orthoxerox 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"?
|
| That's what the article is about. The "common knowledge" is
| that it doesn't scale at all, that as soon as you become an
| established company you need professional managers. Paul
| provides counterexamples that prove it can scale and when it
| does it benefits the company immensely. He is hesitant to
| recommend this management mode outright because he doesn't
| know:
|
| - what exactly do these founders do that makes their management
| more effective than business administration - what the limits
| of founder management are - how to trace the limits across the
| org chart
| 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
| lioeters wrote:
| > if it's software, it can be in one repo
|
| Hm, so a company in founder mode is like a monorepo with all
| projects, software, documentation, branches, processes, owners,
| contributors, activities, tests, issues, pull requests and code
| reviews.. Consolidated, visible, under source control.
|
| Following that analogy, a company in manager mode is like many
| repos independently developing, collaborating with each other
| when needed but mostly siloed and managed separately. Maybe
| like microservices..
|
| > workers are CPUs so the coders are new managers
|
| An organization as a form of parallel computing with humans. It
| feels like this could yield some insights by digging deeper
| into the concept.
| 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.
| mihaic wrote:
| I'm sure you mean well, but this is exactly the the non-
| founder response I'm talking about. And maybe things were
| different 20 years ago, I don't know.
|
| There's always something better I could have done as the
| person in charge, obviously. I've done a lot of reflection
| and self-critique, please believe me, and I realized I've
| made a lot of mistakes, from which the situations could have
| been recovered though.
|
| Putting my faith in employees, expecting them to do maybe
| 80-90% of what I was doing as an employee 10 years earlier
| created an almost unrecoverable situation, that burned the
| entire runway to unscramble. Yet if I say that my biggest
| lesson was never to put trust in employees, as it's most
| likely impossible to create a good incentive system for them,
| most people won't believe me, as I'm sure you won't either.
|
| I've come to think that the burden is no longer on anyone to
| create incentive systems, it's on society to reintroduce some
| morality. Only a limited amount of businesses have the luxury
| of aligned incentives.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I can be incentivized by money, but it has to be in the 7
| figure range. The reality is that tech workers with a
| little bit of work can clear 400k/yr at BigCo with much
| higher job security and much lower variance than any
| startup.
|
| Why would I grind at a startup where the best case scenario
| I am getting a payout I could get at FAANG without any of
| the risk?
|
| I have been through a successful exit as a SWE and you can
| be sure that the founders did everything in their power to
| maximize their own payout and minimize my payout. In a
| company of 40 the founders got a payout of 100x any other
| individual at the company, even those who were there early
| on and stayed until the exit. I got a (taxable) payout of
| ~300k and the founders got 40mil. The money was life
| changing for the founders, but for everyone else it was
| just a nice bonus.
|
| Now I just work at BigCo and make 400k/yr, every year.
| nlitened wrote:
| > > employees simply doing what was best for them > No leader
| should expect anything different from their people
|
| But then there are generals who lead soldiers to die so that
| a war is won. So at least there exists another mode of
| leadership not covered by your statement.
| 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.
| maccard wrote:
| Those people won't last at big corp, and won't be
| interested in it.
|
| As for how you attract them - same way you attract anyone
| else. Give them something they want. For these people
| it's agency, freedom and high level guideposts. For a
| productive big corp employee it's clear guidance,
| timelines and a hierarchy to adhere to.
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| i can't parse that
| 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...
| re-thc wrote:
| > It implies you understand your customers business better
| than they do.
|
| The quote does say "I" so there is an inherent assumption
| there. The problem with taking any quote and "best
| practice" at face value that can be applied anywhere is
| always incorrect.
|
| > There's a few Steve Jobs quotes which have tanked the
| tech industry.
|
| So hence it's like the hype trains an social media driven
| development. People need to think. Don't blame Jobs for it.
| maayank wrote:
| I like to say "you can't delegate vision"
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Too true. Also, you can't delegate your own responsibility.
|
| That doesn't stop people trying.
| 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
| madmask wrote:
| Do you prefer meetings or solving problems? Pretty sure
| I'd jump off a bridge after 2 weeks of meetings
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I'm talking about maximizing my dollar per mental
| processing unit ratio. I think that's kind of the gist of
| what being smart is in this thread. Get more money,
| reduce mental overhead, or both.
|
| "I'm so much smarter than them."
|
| "Well they have a yacht and 3 homes."
|
| Who used their smartness better?
| joacco wrote:
| Why are you equating being smart with being rich? Those
| two are not the same
| fluorinerocket wrote:
| This sounds like my last company.
|
| Was it a new space startup in the Bay area?
| bradneuberg wrote:
| Interesting, what new space startup was that?
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| Hiring is so scary.
|
| If you get the wrong people in the beginning, it can throw
| you into a wrong trajectory that's almost impossible to
| correct later.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It's not only getting the right people, it's
| incentivizing them properly
|
| When hires have no skin in the game besides their wage
| (which they're legally bound to receive until terminated,
| regardless of business outcomes), and have minimal
| material share in success, they are going to play
| different games to preserve that wage
|
| If you want people to act like partners in the business,
| make them partners
| 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.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >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
|
| Yep, just look at 3M for instance. They were already an
| established chemical manufacturer, but they could afford to
| have some people spend their time investing adhesives. One
| of these was a total failure for the desired application
| (they wanted a strong adhesive for aerospace, they got a
| weak but reusable adhesive), but then they spent more time
| looking for applications for this, and now everyone and his
| dog uses 3M Post-It Notes.
| 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".
| darwinawardz wrote:
| Software "Engineers" thinking about creating documentation
| and actually creating documentation? Where? Usually I find
| "engineers" trying to use new unrelated tech to create more
| work for themselves and the company. Like adding the AWS
| stack to an Azure firm. Or the overzelous "perfectionist"
| starting with way too much abstraction to solve a simple
| problem. Real engineers get certificates, but software
| "engineers" range from over-glorified PowerApps developers
| all the way to the people who program medical devices and
| other life/death-grade solutions. The former never thinks
| about documentation and the latter has most all
| documentation provided or automatically generated.
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I think the main driver is a lot more simple than other
| people have said: when you don't need that efficiency you can
| focus on resilience instead. As the pandemic showed with JIT
| supply chains, efficiency and resilience are often at odds.
| And the bigger you are the more resilience you want to
| protect your core business and let you just turn the fly
| wheel that's making you profitable. That's also why you see
| companies start to engage in monopolistic and anticompetitive
| practices - now that they have the weight they can waste
| resources on protecting their business instead of just
| growing it by being more efficient.
|
| This is 100% bad from a country/market level but is what you
| get when you let local optimizations trump capitalism. In
| some sense that local optimization also isn't bad - it's not
| uncommon that that behavior is also what lets efficiencies be
| extracted.
|
| In other words, in many ways all of this is inevitable
| behavior as things grow and a lot of it are themselves
| (perhaps inevitable) symptoms of the mechanics at play rather
| than the mechanics themselves.
|
| In other words, once "founder mode" is documented, you'll
| have everyone claiming they're doing founder mode same as how
| everyone says they're now doing agile or whatever other fad
| you want to pick and you'll be back at square one until
| someone then invents "strategic founder mode" or "growth
| founder mode" and claims to have figured out how you can spot
| that vs what everyone is just pretending to do right now.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > This is 100% bad from a country/market level but is what
| you get when you let local optimizations trump capitalism.
| In some sense that local optimization also isn't bad - it's
| not uncommon that that behavior is also what lets
| efficiencies be extracted.
|
| Is it really 100% bad? Do people really think that the goal
| of humanity is to work in the most efficient way to extract
| the most economic value from everything possible? Can't we
| just be content being 50% efficient and use the other 50%
| of that effort to chill with family and friends and talk
| about films or something?
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| There are visible and invisible numbers, which are
| fundamentally at odds.
|
| If your sole objective is to ,,number goes up", you
| sacrifice everything which is not trivially quantifiable.
| philwelch wrote:
| > As the pandemic showed with JIT supply chains, efficiency
| and resilience are often at odds.
|
| I'm not convinced this is necessarily true. JIT implies
| making all of your buffers more obvious, and you will want
| to reduce unnecessary buffers to save cost, but maintaining
| some buffers for the sake of resilience isn't incompatible
| with JIT supply chains. The problem comes when you combine
| short-term oriented management with JIT supply chains; if
| you quantify the cost of a buffer, you make it easier for
| that type of management to make that kind of decision.
|
| Toyota, for example, is one of the firms that popularized
| JIT, but they don't usually run into the same short-termist
| problems that afflict other firms. Relatedly, Toyota's
| senior management have all spent decades if not their
| entire careers at Toyota and still includes members of the
| Toyoda family. Those guys are probably not going to play
| fast and loose with resiliency just to make quarterly
| numbers look good. They are going to look at the quantified
| and understood cost of their resiliency buffers and say,
| "removing this buffer might save lots of money next quarter
| but in the long run that represents a risk to a company I
| intend to pass down to my grandchildren so I won't do it".
| Whereas a different manager at a different company might
| say, "this will definitely make the next quarter's numbers
| look amazing and if there are consequences in the long run,
| either I'll have switched companies or I can just say it's
| not my fault".
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| agreed
|
| as you know, though, there _is_ a connection between this
| kind of security and garbage collection. specifically, if
| you 're using a language that bounds-checks all array
| accesses, so array overruns are impossible, but relies on
| that same application programmer to free pointers
| manually, you can have a use-after-free bug, where a
| function pointer is written into heap space previously
| occupied by an array (or other data structure) to which a
| pointer still exists. if the attacker can cause writes to
| happen via that pointer, they can still break your
| security
|
| garbage collection is a perfect guarantee against use-
| after-free bugs, unless of course the garbage collector
| is buggy. it's not the only possible solution;
| alternative solutions include statically allocating
| everything (abjuring dynamic allocation completely, like
| cobol), linear typing, never deallocating anything, and
| mlkit's region-based memory allocation are some
| alternatives which have been used. garbage collection is
| the most popular and probably the most practical
|
| so it's not just that we have thousands of applications
| use the same debugged low-level buffer manipulation
| routines. it's also that we have thousands of
| applications use the same debugged garbage collector
|
| i want to point out that even without having code and
| data in the same memory space, there are a variety of
| things an attacker may be able to do. when non-executable
| stacks, aslr, and w^x protections started being
| implemented, attackers started returning into libc;
| function pointers that point into the middle of libc
| would work just as well. (return-oriented programming
| might be more difficult, unless the thing being used-
| after-freeing was a large stack-allocated variable, which
| would be unusual.) and of course if there are shell
| commands, sql commands, java bytecode, or the like in
| data memory, overwriting them with malicious data may be
| just as good as uploading malicious machine code
| 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.
| getnormality wrote:
| He isn't going back on anything. This is a
| misrepresentative oversimplification of the text.
| 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.
| dbuser99 wrote:
| 100% agreed. If you read this piece from the lens of a SV
| executive or VC it makes perfect sense and serves the interests
| of all parties. Content? Who cares
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > Is it take your favourite employees on a retreat, don't worry
| about the message this sends?
|
| Well the message is "be excellent and next year you'll be there
| too". A failure to reward great employees out of fear of
| picking favorites is IMO one of the big problems of modern
| corporate management.
|
| An impact of an outstanding employee is an order of magnitude
| bigger than that of an average one. You should reward people
| accordingly and openly. Here "accordingly" can literally mean
| "an order of magnitude bigger comp" and "openly" means you tell
| everyone this guy is rewarded because he works so well.
|
| Instead what often happens is "here's a 20% raise but don't
| tell anybody so they don't think you're special. We're all
| equals here".
| itsoktocry wrote:
| This post is literally all over social media. The argument
| seems no deeper than "hire good people who care about the
| business". Not exactly rocket science.
| 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.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Running at 20% optimization means certain death or at best
| zombification for startups that haven't reached escape velocity
| so there's that
| regularfry wrote:
| It's a numbers game. If you're in a position where you suddenly
| have to hire for the top of a tree, then you're virtually
| certain to have a hiring pool of people who have become
| successful acting as though the sort of culture you want to
| sustain is impossible and can't exist.
|
| There's a lot of management "common sense" which is oriented to
| that 20% solution and denying that 80% is even possible. I
| don't think the framework is impossible to learn as much as
| that the lessons needed are culturally out of alignment with
| how the professional management class speak. MBA courses have a
| lot to answer for.
| 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?
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| This? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-
| product...
| onursurme wrote:
| No, it must be August 2024, because paulgraham.com says "At a
| YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk..." and the blog
| post is dated as September 2024.
| 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.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| "I must say, please don't post articles plastered with ads.
| Thank you."
|
| try this:
| chrome://extensions/?id=llimhhconnjiflfimocjggfjdlmlhblm
| 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
| nberkman wrote:
| Fair enough, I should know to check Urban Dictionary
| first. Thanks.
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| > _If your department heads are not your most skilled
| operators, then... maybe that 's a good problem to fix._
|
| department heads spend all their time organizing groups of
| people. if organizing people better is your company's
| competitive advantage, then sure, putting your best people in
| those seats is probably best. but if your company's
| competitive advantage is that it makes better optical
| instruments, produces gasoline more cheaply, demolishes
| buildings more safely, or makes better-tasting food--you'd
| better let your best operators spend a lot of their time
| grinding mirrors, operating refineries, annotating floor
| plans, or cooking. if they spend all their time organizing
| people, your company will lose its competitive advantage
| 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.
| mizzao wrote:
| GP said "different methods" presumably indicating not
| operating similarly.
| 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.
| martindbp wrote:
| The thing is, as a consumer I can't tell any difference
| between the technical solutions of Netflix vs Disney+, HBO
| Max or basically any other streaming service at this point,
| which proves that it's not actually that hard of a problem,
| at least today. I'm sure they were very innovative when
| they pioneered streaming but this is 2024. I'm sure their
| tech is better in multiple ways, but not in ways that
| actually lead to an edge, or is even noticeable to
| consumers. Now it's all about what content they have.
|
| For comparison, I can tell a MacBook is better than a
| Windows laptop in 100 different ways. I can tell that the
| touch screen UI and self driving features in a Tesla is 15
| years ahead a Toyota, but I cannot tell Netflix is better
| than its competitors.
| 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
| computerdork wrote:
| Both the video clip and the guy's personal experience at
| Netflix were _Hilarious_. And have gone through this too
| (as most of us have).
|
| Yeah, typical corporate development, where often the
| smallest of changes can be a nightmare:)
| jarsin wrote:
| This made reading this whole thread worth it. Right when i
| was feeling bad about coasting in some small company..
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| All that effort to make a weird "feature" that no user
| actually wanted. The reason it took them all that work to
| do is that the assumption that you wouldn't reorder seasons
| was baked into the architecture. For the engineers that
| designed it was just unthinkable, and for good reason.
| kapad wrote:
| A bit "off" the off-topic point.
|
| - I'm not really sure Stadia can be called a "technical
| achievement at _scale_ ". Mainly because it didn't achieve
| all that much scale to begin with. Definitely a technical
| achievement in cloud gaming. But the implementation at scale
| is something that I now see Sony and Xbox working toward
| (along with their console partners - hardware and software).
|
| - Youtube, definitely, given the content base, the number of
| active users at literally anytime, is a monumental
| achievement. But so are a bunch of porn websites. And I know
| the porn industry doesn't have a good rep. Even in
| engineering. Still, porn sees more active users than Youtube
| and netflix combined, albeit, on a bunch of different
| websites, but a few large enough websites that are comparable
| to Youtube in terms of active users, and catalogue size.
| Also, these companies manage to host all of this content and
| delivery it all over the world on a much smaller budget than
| Youtube. Not to take away any of Youtube's achievements, but
| from a technical point of view, I do think the porn industry
| wins. To begin with, porn streaming is older than youtube,
| but quite a few years actually. Additionally, from what I've
| heard, some of the popular live streams on OnlyFans (and
| similar websites) see more concurrent viewers than most
| YouTube live streams.
| 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.
| manojbajaj95 wrote:
| Yes. This is important, rather than treating it as a gospel,
| each company/founder has to find out a way that work for them.
| It doesn't have to Steve Jobs model nor the John Sculley model.
| kapad wrote:
| Reed Hastings is also equally famous for having a rather non-
| traditional managerial style. Especially the "keeper test".
|
| > If a person on your team were to quit tomorrow, would you try
| to change their mind? Or would you accept their resignation,
| perhaps with a little relief? If the latter, you should give
| them a severance package now and look for a star, someone you
| would fight to keep.
|
| I agree with some of the other replies. That Hastings was very
| aware of two things - He's not the best manager - Corporate
| manager's are full of bs
|
| IMO, the "keeper test" and some of the other famous and/or
| controversial policies at Netflix are a direct approach at
| avoid "manager mode".
| knallfrosch wrote:
| If we just keep extrapolating from success stories, we'll
| inevitably run into survivorshop bias.
|
| We can find a thousand companies where founders returned and
| made the company bigger, but what about those where the founder
| blocked growth and they never rose to prominence in the first
| place?
| 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.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| is there any evidence it's more effective? PG offered one
| example, ABNB, which has had a lagging stock price since IPO.
| 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.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Startup founders are probably never pessimists.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Paranoid optimists?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| You're obviously not a startup founder with an attitude
| like that. And it's OK: being a founder of a startup
| _really_ isn 't for everyone, for good reason. Most
| startups fail, remember. And like you, most people don't
| want to dedicate their life to a company. I wouldn't want
| to be a founder either: I like having a life outside work.
| Founders are different; their company is their "baby" so
| they have an entirely different outlook to work than the
| rest of us.
| 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.
| sowbug wrote:
| It could also be survivorship bias. It's easy for a
| successful founder to say he or she felt it but couldn't
| describe it, but maybe it was just luck.
|
| I don't know -- I've never worked at a strongly founder-
| driven company. I'm just trying to figure out what the
| essay means.
| 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.
| ryeguy_24 wrote:
| Agree
| 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.
| cloche wrote:
| Really interesting response. So if hiring from the outside
| isn't ideal and promoting from within isn't ideal, what is
| the solution? Going back 3 years ago, what would you have
| done instead?
| cj wrote:
| What ended up working was hiring a Sales Manager instead of
| a VP.
|
| The lesser title attracted candidates who were happy to
| take direction from founders, and the founder still stays
| in the "head of sales" seat.
|
| Once the sales manager is ramped up, grow as much as
| possible then bring a VP to oversee it all, but with a
| larger team already in place it will be harder for them to
| mess up what's working.
| 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.
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| That's the point we're making here: there is no argument.
| 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).
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| I've been using AirBnb for a long time and product is the
| same, I see no innovations in it. Maybe that's why the stock
| price has been lagging.
| 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.
| nstart wrote:
| To be fair, I think this is acknowledged by Paul in this essay.
| He treats Founder mode as something that isn't well studied,
| isn't well defined, but has a vibe to it that people familiar
| with it would recognize immediately. The essay struck me as
| more of a call to action to study this style of company running
| and to acknowledge the "manager mode" as a possibly destructive
| model if relied on as the sole mode a company is run by.
| regularfry wrote:
| It's a "generative culture" according to Westrum's
| organisational typology. Recognising it as that makes it clear
| that a) there is actually something to this, b) PG's being less
| novel here than he thinks, and c) everyone here needs to read
| more.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| Objectively, original post had little to no details in it to
| link it to any kind of typology.
|
| Sidenote: the fact that someone came up with another typology
| or classificator does not mean they know how to predict the
| outcomes in any way. It is the same exact MBTI style of
| pseudo-science which polluted tech and business world for
| decades. For someone urging others to read more, you've
| surely read something about the hindsight bias?[0]
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
| 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.
| dogman144 wrote:
| This is the one good comment here tbh. Work it around a few
| times, one starts to learn one must check and check again if
| that unique idea isn't already a company, or worse a whole
| industry. All PG is saying is there's some delta between 1x
| employee/founder doing everything and a fleet of MBAs coming
| and not doing much. If you've led teams, you know this is true.
| Doesn't take a groundbreaking essay to map that out.
| 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."
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| yes, correct.
|
| You cannot get involved in every decision as a CEO of a large
| company. Suppose you did a skip level meeting. Who is going to
| gaslight you more, the lower level person or your direct report
| with a massive stock award who is incentivized for the company
| to succeed? far from clear.
| 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.
| bcantrill wrote:
| Well, compromise _is_ the hypotenuse of the conjoined
| triangles of success!
| dilyevsky wrote:
| The main takeaway of this piece is to be wary of the principal-
| agent problem but hey everyone already knew that, right? RIGHT?
| mlindner wrote:
| I find myself thinking more and more that Bryan Cantrill,
| despite him highly disliking Elon Musk, seems to agree with him
| regularly on many things including things such a this.
| 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.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| if you can't hire good people, "founder mode" is not going to
| help you.
| 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"
| borroka wrote:
| It is funny that we take such nonsense seriously when the
| inventor of radio and the brilliant people who built the
| telecommunications system on top of it said: "try this thing,
| you can call your mother who lives in Australia from the
| United States".
|
| No, "the waves that can be used are not the eternal waves,"
| they built a miracle and made people use it.
| 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.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Yes, and when various people start to fake-claim that they
| work in Founder Mode, you're more likely to hire the wrong
| managers or CEO, once it's time to find someone for
| whatever reason.
| 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.
| joquarky wrote:
| I just want to write code.
|
| I don't want all the fuss anymore.
|
| It's all just such a mess now.
| darwinawardz wrote:
| Write code peacefully,
|
| No more fuss and endless mess,
|
| Mind at ease, clear skies.
| legel wrote:
| This haiku response is art.
| 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
| baby wrote:
| Do managers focus on tactical goals? Or do the engineers do
| that? Managers are more like the glue of the system, they
| don't really provide much value besides that.
| sramam wrote:
| In the enterprise, the cost of failure to ones
| career/reputation is unreasonably high. pg's reference to
| "most skillful liars in the world" stuck out to me.
|
| The extreme conservatism employed by managers to prevent
| failure - can only be summed up as "success at any cost".
| The consequence is decisions that spread the pain far and
| wide.
|
| Unfortunately, these managers are not accountable for these
| consequences.
|
| It's no winder that solutions take longer, cost more, are
| sub-optimal at almost every level. Furthermore, they very
| painful for the poeple who have to suffer these solutions.
| But hey, some unrelated manager-chain can claim success.
|
| The worst of it is, these managers rinse-and-repeat at
| their next gig!
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| Depends on what the responsibilities of your lowest
| managers are.
| 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.
| mustpax wrote:
| Really well put. "Processes is a symptom of competence, not
| the cause" is a good motto.
| malfist wrote:
| Your Dad founded Celestron? That's crazy. I use an edgehd for
| all my astrophotography. It's a damn fine instrument.
| mlindner wrote:
| The current Celstron is owned by a Taiwanese company and just
| acts as a US distributor for that company so I wouldn't say
| its the same company anymore.
| kamaal wrote:
| This is just a different way of saying your managers need to be
| more engaged with the work they are doing and not just worry
| about abstract metrics like measuring progress by number of
| tickets they close or something as such.
|
| The thing is this is hard to pull off even for the actual
| founders. For starters its just hard, and tiring(and even
| pointless) to keep jumping over the ever increasing bar. Even
| more so when you are aging, know you are going to die and you
| are better off enjoying some of that money you earned, in the
| time and health that remains. At that point, you let things go
| on autopilot and begin to reduce engagement with your work.
|
| The middle managers and employees you hire don't have incentive
| to even care this much. They are neither paid this high to
| care, nor have much to lose if they don't. Younger people show
| some passion because they wish to learn, but once they have
| enough of it, they go on the same mode.
|
| To summarise. For people who made big money making a little
| extra doesn't matter all that much. People who don't get paid,
| don't even bother to try.
| nick3443 wrote:
| Some people like contributing to successful projects though,
| and stay engaged even while maintaining work-life balance.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Yes definitely, I think so too.
|
| And there's a difference between working with curing cancer
| or optimizing people wasting money in Candy Crush
| solidninja wrote:
| It comes back to the work itself being interesting and
| whether you actually care about the field that you are
| working in. I would not like to live in a world where you
| have to put in 80 hours a week to get a decent salary as an
| expert. It's true that there are a lot of people who got into
| the industry just because of the comp though :(
| kamaal wrote:
| >>It's true that there are a lot of people who got into the
| industry just because of the comp though :(
|
| Lots of people are just tuned out. And just don't care.
| With or without the comp.
|
| >>It comes back to the work itself being interesting and
| whether you actually care about the field that you are
| working in.
|
| There was this HR in a company here in India. She spoke at
| length about what attracted people to IT. Basically the
| employees wanted the realisation that they were creating
| tremendous value for the company, at the same time earning
| very high, and of course wanted work life balance. It was
| more or less impossible to achieve this. There aren't even
| enough projects of substance to make this happen. At least
| not for everyone, all the time. The net result was people
| _tuned out_ , or just don't involve themselves enough at
| their work, or associate the outcome of their work at
| personal level.
|
| Another additional factor how quickly the product/projects
| get shut down/eol in our industry. There are not many
| things that last for years that you take pride building
| them.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| There's nothing unique about Startups in this sense.
|
| What we are talking about is people who care about the success
| of the business and pleasing customers, versus people who are
| optimizing for "corporate success" (ladder climbing).
|
| You can find both types of people everywhere, at all levels. So
| it really is about "hire the best people". You just have to
| have the right measure of "best".
| scott_w 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."
|
| Oh I can totally picture this being used as an excuse for bad
| micromanagement! Unfortunately a lot of people are more
| interested in "doing the label" than developing a deep
| understanding of why they'd do something and how to apply it
| correctly.
|
| And yes, I know I just described cargo-culting ;-)
| borroka wrote:
| Doesn't it sound like the most self-absorbed footnote in the
| history of footnotes? "Attention, sailors. I just defined a
| new concept (--which is as new as the wheel, by the way--),
| which fundamentally changes how we see organizations, but it
| will be misused".
|
| How people can take someone so self-indulgent and -absorbed
| seriously is beyond me. I am sure he is great at his job of
| nurturing start-ups, but what he had to say, he already said
| a long time ago.
| whizzter wrote:
| I think it's much more simple than having a separate manager or
| founder mode..
|
| Good founders will want to learn or at least understand all
| tasks that sets their business apart without becoming micro-
| managers, when their become overburdened by details in certain
| areas the default action should be to delegate to someone they
| _trust_ with doing in the area rather than just hiring someone
| with a CV and charisma that _implies_ that they are good at
| handling that area.
|
| This probably often works well for most founders initially when
| they only need to delegate practical tasks that they know how
| to measure directly.
|
| However once the money stakes, and most importantly number of
| people grow. The tasks needed to be delegated are managerial
| rather than practical so the founders become faced with another
| kind of delegation that they have less proficiency in.
|
| This is probably where things go awry, at least some of their
| early promotions or delegations probably didn't thrive as
| managers, faced with failures they start seeking out managers
| from the managerial class from the outside rather than risk
| finding the right people with domain knowledge to promote.
| regularfry wrote:
| I don't see anything distinct enough to call "founder mode"
| here. It's just one (very important, but small) sub-facet of
| Ron Westrum's organisational typology. That specific behaviour,
| of a top-of-the-tree authority figure getting involved in the
| weeds, is just one behaviour he calls out as characterising
| generative cultures, but there are others: an eagerness to find
| mistakes is another important one.
|
| This has become more popularised by DORA, but Westrum divides
| cultures into "Generative", "Bureaucratic", and "Pathological".
| Someone who finds a mistake is praised in a generative culture,
| ignored in a bureaucratic one, and blamed in a pathological
| one. The conventional "management"-type detail-hiding hierarchy
| would be absolutely stereotypical of bureaucratic or
| pathological cultures depending on the goal.
|
| From that point of view I think this is better understood than
| you'd think, but possibly not well communicated.
| mempko wrote:
| What I'm disappointed by is that in the hundreds of years of
| capitalism, there has been little or no scientific research
| that looks at what structures create companies that have the
| desirable attributes we want. The fact that Paul Graham is
| now coining 'founder mode' without formulating any theory and
| approach to test what works (you would think VCs would be a
| group capable of doing this research) is disappointing.
|
| The lack of any scientific rigor means we have founders
| floundering when building companies. For now we can just
| point to individual cases like Steve Jobs or Valve and have
| to guess why what they did worked. We are in the snake oil
| period of corporate governance.
| borroka wrote:
| "What I'm disappointed by is that in the hundreds of years
| of capitalism, there has been little or no scientific
| research that looks at what structures create companies
| that have the desirable attributes we want."
|
| -- It may well be that, beyond the obvious, it depends on
| the broader social (how society is structured) and
| financial context, and the spirit of the times. The same
| could be said of all sorts of "how to's": how to get rich,
| how to be successful in life (the vagueness of which
| already throws a wrench into the engine of exploration),
| how to win at soccer/football/whatever sport or skill you
| are interested in.
|
| While technology may open new horizons with capabilities
| that were not there before (think 4G and true mobile
| internet experience), one might ask why, looking back at
| the "primitive" ways sports were trained for and played 50
| years ago, nobody had the intuition to propose ways of
| training and playing that are closer to what we see today.
| It did not require new technology, it needed a different
| way of thinking about the problem. But what scientific
| research, such as the one you propose to use to study how
| organizations win, would have allowed this thinking to
| emerge? And the same will probably be pondered 50 years
| from now when their ways will be compared to ours.
| kqr2 wrote:
| Is Brian Chesky's talk available online?
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| Probably here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-
| podcast-product...
| kqr2 wrote:
| Isn't that podcast from last year whereas this talk was last
| week?
| 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.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Why didn't he have the ability to foresee the idea was bad?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| portnoy is not the op
| Drunkfoowl wrote:
| Usually its an over leverage issue. He extends credit to the
| very limit and then something goes wonky, maybe a few things
| at once and the core business takes a hit.
|
| Also, the more reach the less control (by design/definition)
| and QC is always a risk in that scenario.
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| > What did they do that was so bad that it cost him 3
| locations?
|
| Skilfully timed when growing and succeeding. Unlucky timing
| when failing.
| joshvm wrote:
| This is partly why I enjoyed working at, and respected, my old
| company so much. Having owners who had been burned by terrible
| managers in the past, and who had families to support made a
| big difference in terms of the risks that we would and could
| take. I never worried about losing my job. Rather than try and
| find seed funding, we just took on projects that we knew could
| deliver, built relationships that allowed us to continue those
| projects and slowly grew the business out.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Seems a particularly bad strategy for restaurants, seen
| countless restaurants that started as one location with queues
| down the block, to two locations then eventually they're at 5
| or more and you go and the food is awful, like the ingredients
| might all be correct but the way its prepared just tastes gross
| compared to what it used to be because the process or the
| passion hasn't transferred correctly.
|
| The odd one manages it but too many just end up with low
| talent, low invested staff slopping out bad food that has none
| of the implementation or taste that funded the expansion and
| the whole things slowly collapses in on itself.
| Kagerjay wrote:
| One thing you learn about the restaurant industry during
| expansion is maintaining talent and culture is not easy. Alot
| of these restaurant cultures succeed if there is either a top
| level culture passed down by two or more founders, or its
| instilled from a family culture
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| WeWork was a finance concept. Lease commercial real estate
| in bulk long term, subdivide and sublease it short term,
| and borrow medium term to finance it. That's a speculation
| on interest rates and short-term commercial real estate
| rents.
|
| The CEO got a really good exit package from Softbank.[1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann#Business_career
| fsndz wrote:
| Regarding Boeing, it's true that the principal-agent
| problem and misaligned incentives are issues. However, you
| must also consider the impact of promoting business school
| graduates and McKinsey-type consultants--who often believe
| they are the smartest people in the room, despite lacking
| operational expertise beyond making slides--to leadership
| positions in a company driven by engineering. Naturally,
| these business types will focus on short-term revenue and
| stock prices, as they have been trained their entire lives
| to optimize for vanity metrics like GPA, company prestige,
| and strategy over operations. This mindset is ingrained in
| their identity, leading them to undermine the engineering
| culture. For instance, Boeing's CEOs reportedly referred to
| engineering leaders as "retards" and "losers." Now, we are
| witnessing the consequences of these actions.
| twelve40 wrote:
| Boeing is a very strange example to give for this, because
| it's been under "professional management" for probably one
| whole century now. How does professional management suddenly
| decimate it today vs. say 1960, when it was also run like a
| corporation?
| 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...
| twelve40 wrote:
| one can only wish he was just as thorough when deciding which
| convicted felon's private jet to board... must have slipped his
| mind that one time
| 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?
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Yes, how to let go of people quickly who aren't working out.
| Firing people always sucks, and many managers avoid it for
| too long, to the detriment of the company and the other
| employees.
| maayank wrote:
| I meant what is your advice regarding how to do it
| well/what you mean by doing it well, precisely because of
| what you wrote :) apologies for the unclarity
| 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?
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| Maybe this? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-
| podcast-product...
| 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.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| On the flip side you can hire Michael Jordan and screw
| everything else up and still win. Then go on to write a
| business book that's completely misleading because you never
| realize that you did only one thing right, and that was
| enough.
| cloche wrote:
| > On the flip side you can hire Michael Jordan and screw
| everything else up and still win
|
| Unless your company is a baseball team
| 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.
| DeborahWrites wrote:
| I'm belatedly learning this lesson (you'd think I'd have caught
| on earlier in my career) I very much want to stick to small
| young startups in future, but there's less demand for tech
| writers there.
| smeej wrote:
| You might have trouble finding opportunities to do this full-
| time anywhere, but if you could manage the documentation and
| knowledge base (especially if they're training AI bots
| internally and to support customers from it) for 3-4 client
| companies, you might be able to make that work.
|
| Good technical writing is especially important now. I guess
| you can try to train bots on the codebase itself, but unless
| _that 's_ pretty well documented, I wouldn't expect as much
| from that as training them on good technical documentation.
| DeborahWrites wrote:
| Yeah I freelanced for 4yrs before returning to employee-
| land in 2022. I think I'm going to go back to it
| eventually, but nervous in the current market.
| k__ wrote:
| Startups need tech writers very much, but only at a certain
| size you can do it full time at one company.
|
| Either you freelance and work for multiple companies or you
| add other skills to your portfolio.
|
| For example
|
| - creating videos of your articles/docs
|
| - hosting events like hackathons or meetups
|
| - developing libraries or integrating the product with
| popular platforms
| 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?
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| I used to hop on walls and doors when I was 13 running
| around. But this guy was in his 20s or 30s and did not expect
| to see me draw on him.
|
| They leave trash in the hallways or smoke in the corridors.
| When you're on vacation people act a little more free
| spirited.
| cabbageicefruit wrote:
| I'd love to see the numbers on this. I suspect that the middle
| class families buying a rental to Airbnb are largely
| inconsequential to the housing crisis compared to the
| corporations buying thousands of homes to cash in on rent for
| the rest of eternity.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| Anecdotally, I can say in Florida it's people renting them
| out and not living in them. The locals are priced out.
|
| I can afford it, but non tech/banking (the normal people)
| have moved inland to much worse spots. I only have 2 live-in
| neighbors on my floor of 8 units; the rest is Airbnb/Some guy
| who bought the unit to 'invest'.
|
| I talk with the owners because they occasionally need my
| physical presence to do something. But all these units would
| have been families - like they were in the early 2010s.
| specialist wrote:
| Housing market is inelastic. Small changes in supply have
| outsized impact on price.
| nox101 wrote:
| It might depend on the city but this was recommended recently
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6428660
|
| their claim. Developers built to the market, the market being
| people wanting an investment rental property. The prices got
| so high that no one can afford to rent them so investors are
| losing money. It used to be, mortgage payment = $x. rent =
| $x+($500-$1000) but now it's rent = $x-($500-$1000). Further,
| they aren't sellable because they were never designed to be a
| good place to live long term.
|
| at least that's my summary.
|
| They didn't explain if all this is true why the prices
| haven't dropped 30-80% to the price that people might be
| willing to buy things they don't really want. As in "hey,
| this place is way smaller than I want but the price is really
| low and the location is great". As it is now it's more like
| "this place as way smaller than I want and even if I could
| afford it it's not worth the price"
|
| I'm curious if the same thing happened in other cities.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| At the height of it, entire buildings were emptied out or
| built for short term rentals in the largest US cities.
| fsndz wrote:
| I frankly don't know why people keep using Airbnb now. It's
| costly, and the service is worse than a hotel. My worst
| vacations have happened in Airbnbs. Even for group vacations
| with friends, we now choose hotels. The good Airbnbs seem to be
| only the luxury or high-end types, suitable for very high-
| income or rich people.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| If you want to go to a group location with several friends
| and have
|
| 1. Privacy
|
| 2. Your own kitchen
|
| Hotels still don't cut it. Usually a stay needs to exceed
| some length of time needs (due to the cleaning fee typically
| being flat in Airbnb's) before it becomes worthwhile. But if
| you're in that camp (4+ people, 4+ days) it becomes pretty
| worthwhile. The cost savings on food alone makes it back up
| pretty quick, plus there are other savings usually related to
| parking being included etc.
| csa wrote:
| > But if you're in that camp (4+ people, 4+ days)
|
| Have you tried Residence Inn 2-bedroom suites?
|
| There aren't many of them in any given location, but they
| are absolutely amazing for 4 people when you can get one.
|
| My experience has been positive, and my friends and family
| who have tried it were also impressed.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| I haven't stayed out of a kitchenette suite but yeah that
| does sound like a good option if you have the right
| amount of people who are cool with the sleeping
| arrangements as described. Gets rid of most of the
| drawbacks I mentioned above around kitchens. Still not
| ideal for a lot of scenarios but at least a good option
| in certain circumstances.
| xandrius wrote:
| It really depends on the country and what you're looking for.
|
| In your description, you might be doing it only for a short
| holiday but when you travel long term, living only in hotels
| is truly awful.
|
| Airbnb is the only way to consistently be able to rent a full
| place without having to go through traditional renting
| agencies which require oh so much paperwork, even for just a
| month.
|
| The alternative is finding privates on Facebook but with that
| you just can never be sure.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I don't think it's undecided at all. Pre Airbnb, rent might be
| $50/day ($1500/mo) for your place. Airbnb comes along and now
| you can rent it for $200/day. What do you think that does to
| home prices in the area?
| ripped_britches wrote:
| There's gotta be something else to it besides being a founder.
| Musk exhibits "founder mode" in his leadership style for
| companies that he didn't found. Maybe "owner mode" where the
| concept of the company's long-term success is married to your
| concept of yourself as an individual.
| diegof79 wrote:
| I know my comment will sound too cynical or not well-received in
| a startup incubator forum. However, what I observed in common
| with the founders of the B2B startups I worked on was good
| networking.
|
| The board members and initial contacts have much to do with the
| initial clients and the network effect it creates. It doesn't
| matter if you have an excellent product. Without the initial
| boost of early adopters, you'll struggle to survive. That's why
| many founders go to SV or well-known startup incubators: the
| networking it creates is priceless. Of course, you'll need to
| create a valuable product -and that's the problem of many
| opportunistic startups leveraging current trends. Many startup
| pieces of advice I read seem to ignore the fact that you need
| money and contacts to have visibility in the right places (SV,
| elite university/circle).
|
| While Paul Graham is a legend and I look forward to learning from
| his experiences, I believe that people in a position of privilege
| tend to overlook the advantages that come with their position.
|
| For example, it is true that Steve Jobs started in a garage.
| However, both Apple founders were living in the epicenter of
| computing companies at the time. They both worked at HP and had
| contacts with people at Stanford. If you had built a personal
| computer in a garage in Latin America at that time, it would have
| been like a tree falling in the middle of nowhere.
| baby wrote:
| Does your SJ example work? pg is talking about scaling your
| startup after initial success
| diegof79 wrote:
| Yes, you are right. The article discusses scaling. I got
| fixated on the concept of "founder mode" because the article
| invites a discussion about its meaning. My example involving
| Steve Jobs doesn't apply to scaling, but without moving
| forward from the company's initial stages, there isn't
| anything to scale. I think initial networking also plays a
| vital role in decision-making during growth. For example,
| Steve Jobs' contacts with Xerox Parc greatly influenced the
| creation of Apple's Lisa, and Mac.
|
| So, a book on "founder mode" could include multiple chapters
| on leveraging your network to scale your company.
| thinking_banana wrote:
| on the note of the essay, it's pretty cool that Paul had its
| reviewed by Elon too! I hope this continues, instead of the
| sensationalized head butting.
| patcon wrote:
| I wonder about the sibling comment about survivorship bias.
|
| Specifically, I wonder if the reason "founder mode" strikes
| singular founders as a resonant story, is because it's
| representative of a story that can even have a singular
| narrative. The alternative (what pg calls "manager mode" of
| hiring the best people and letting them work) is perhaps one
| where there's more narratives unfolding and exploring the space.
| This could lead to either success or failure. Some spaces have
| less of a singular story, because they run and persist and thrive
| based on having multiple stories working together. Sometime the
| stories are dissonant. I've been in companies where the strength
| felt like it was in how a balance of things existed together,
| without the need to collapse them into a single totalizing
| narrative. This unresolved dissonance in a community can be
| either a weakness or a strength. The ability for a place or an
| organization or a community or a culture to hold contradictory
| truths, this allows a culture to hold within arms-reach an
| archive of more tactics and strategies (some useful in the
| current moment, some not), from which to call on when the
| environment changes, and new needs arise. That's how vibrant
| ecologies work.
|
| Anyhow, this is a bit of a riff, and I imagine some people might
| be strongly opposed. I am not saying it's good or bad to be in
| founder mode. I'm saying it depends. But founder mode will tend
| to create singular founders who have a loud story to tell. The
| story is maybe less clear and loud when the other mode prevails
| and leads to success. It looks like a hundred ppl succeeding
| together, and no one person has the answer as to why, nor do they
| all agree on what that is. So it means that narrative will be
| more diffuse and less boosted.
|
| Maybe more holographic in a metaphorical sense, where the
| information is encoded throughout a social fabric like a
| diffraction pattern, and no one person holds the whole narrative
| or truth, which emerges from the interaction of many narratives,
| both aligned and opposing (likely in small ways below the
| surface).
|
| Context: I co-founded a tech community in Toronto (now ~7000
| people), which for almost 9 years has run weekly participatory
| civic events (50-70 attendees), literally without ever missing a
| week yet. To put it lightly, we've learned a bit about
| distributed leadership, and my comments comes from that
| experience. It's very different from company modes, but some
| companies run on principles I feel quite aligned on.
| heed wrote:
| hot take: i find it a little irresponsible he put this out there
| without properly defining it / expanding on how it should be
| implemented. i already see people on twitter construing the
| concept to however they see fit.
|
| though, to be fair he said it would take a year to do so:
| https://x.com/paulg/status/1830300111232188626?s=46&t=8sSeDI...
| JakeSc wrote:
| As both a 4x founder and recovering manager-of-managers, I have
| to say Founder-vs.-Manager is a bit of a false dichotomy.
|
| Interestingly, the most successful managers I've seen have
| themselves been founders. They had both autonomy and
| organizational trust, and also tenacious creativity, which led to
| significant successes. This binary notion of "are you a
| Manager(tm) or are you a Founder(tm)?" is a false dichotomy and
| leaves great people out.
|
| A founder mentality has certain recognizable characteristics:
| doing whatever it takes to succeed, applying creative solutions
| to challenging problems, going outside your lane to win, and
| putting in energy well beyond the standard 9-5 expected of a
| standard employee. You can hire talented people with such
| qualities AND build an organization with trust and autonomy.
| Bringing it back to Chesky's disastrous results with delegation,
| I'd ask this: Did he just hire bad people?
|
| This dichotomy may at worst cause an entire generation of new
| founders to ignore really fantastic advice, "Hire really great
| people, and give them the support and space to succeed." This is
| not antithetical to: "Oh, and those people should look like
| founders." It's a Both, not One-or-the-Other.
|
| All this said, I do think PG is touching on something super
| interesting, which is an almost anthropological understanding of
| "The Founder", and view that as a very important area of
| discourse and study for the next generation of great companies.
|
| The point that both PG and BC are really trying to say is that
| rigid, hierarchical employee types are detrimental to company's
| long-term success, and instead you should be building your team
| with hungry, bright, and creative problemsolvers who aren't
| afraid to break artificial rules to succeed. But you sure as hell
| be building an organization with trust and giving those founder-
| types everything they need to succeed.
| conductr wrote:
| I think the dichotomy is a gross simplification when presented
| as a single style or piece of advice to be implemented
| globally. The challenge of the founder is to know what is the
| truly important part of their product/market and exercise a
| Founder mode style for those areas. It's where your time as a
| founder is most valuable. There's reason most of the Steve Jobs
| tales are from product design perspective. I expect he knew
| that was, or would be, a significant differentiator of his
| product. Yet, as his company was scaling he likely was pulled
| in many more directions regarding other concerns of a scaling
| company as all founders would be (HR, Accounting, etc), and he
| knew that's where you exercise Manager mode. Hire a good head
| of HR and CFO and let them do their job. It's not worth his
| time to invest much effort in those types of functional minutia
| although they are very important and necessary parts of
| scaling.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Innovation needs an owner. Repeat work needs a manager.
|
| Its that simple.
| ynniv wrote:
| _What the VC's want is to say, "Good idea, kid. The grown-ups'll
| take it from here." But not this time. This is our time. This
| time you're gonna hand 'em a business card that says "I'm
| CEO...bitch"_
| ryeguy_24 wrote:
| Sorry but am I the only one who got absolutely nothing from this.
|
| Firstly, I've never read more generalizations or stereotypes in a
| PG post. So manager mode is when a person sits at the top of a
| company, speaks to X direct reports and cares nothing about how
| they do their job. I've never seen anyone successfully manage
| like this. A skillful manager knows when to dig into ridiculously
| minute details and when not to.
|
| Secondly, this post says Founders can do some things managers
| cannot and then listed no examples of what a non-founding leader
| or manager cannot do. I would think this could be true but mostly
| based on influence/respect/gravitas.
|
| Thirdly, so when someone tells me to hire good people, why does
| that result in hiring professional fakers? What? So founders hire
| professionals and managers hire professional fakers?
|
| Seriously, this post makes no sense and sounds like it's written
| by someone who has no idea what a non-founding human does in
| their job. I think we can all agree that there are good founders
| and bad founders. In fact, there are many many more bad founders
| than good, given that most founders don't get very far - hence
| the existence of incubators which operate to buy a ton of out of
| the money options because most will fail. There are also good
| managers and bad managers. So, have we learned anything here?
|
| Hire good people, let them do their job, trust but verify,
| override their approach when necessary, dig into details when you
| need to.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| agree
| bankcust08385 wrote:
| Yep. The problem with outside advice is that it's too often a
| low-effort opinion missing the context founders in the arena
| have. Another problem is too many rich people don't fully
| intellectualize the advantages or dumb luck (timing) they had on
| their side, and tend to freely proclaim opinions that aren't
| based on evidence as "iron clad laws". The best thing you can do
| as a founder if you have noisy a board member or investor is to
| derisk their mandatory "suggestion" on a smaller scale. It's
| probably a waste of time, but maybe not.
| refurb wrote:
| So the idea is founder mode isn't 100% delegation, its leaders
| staying close enough to the critical aspects to make sure they
| are done to the quality needed?
|
| That makes sense.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| This thread seems beaten to death, yet I feel strongly that I'd
| like to express this:
|
| Groups of people that work together share a common purpose, that
| is aligned with the individual purposes of all the people that
| make up the group. A great leader helps remind people that they
| can cooperate and all win, and uses the clear purpose to cut
| through bullshit. There are few people in the world that can do
| this.
| thom wrote:
| Of the many problems with "hire good people and give them room",
| the first is that you don't necessarily know you're getting good
| people. And if they are good you don't know they're good in your
| environment. You generally do know a founder is good if they've
| got scale problems, but obviously a lot of founders have failed
| before ever reaching that hurdle, and maybe would have benefitted
| from help.
|
| But even assuming you can get good people in the door, the
| problem with giving them room is that you're often creating
| something static and giving them ownership of it. When the world
| suddenly turns sideways and potential needs to flow through
| multiple people's fiefdoms, at the very least you've created a
| lot of friction, but at worst you've erected impenetrable walls.
| That these problems can often only be solved by founders isn't a
| surprise: when you create a a top down structure that doesn't
| work, you can only fix it from the top. It's exceedingly hard to
| delegate the one power that matters, which is the ability to
| reshape the business rather than optimise parts of it. If you can
| work out how to scale that without conflict then you can probably
| solve world peace while you're at it.
| manojbajaj95 wrote:
| In footnotes, he mentioned that C level execs are good at
| managing up rather than down. As I've seen, this happens with a
| lot of founders who are busy manging VCs and other stakeholders
| that they completely rely on VPs.
| lend000 wrote:
| I think pg is trying to be diplomatic here by saying that
| "founder mode" is something to be discovered and taught in
| business schools in the future, and there may be a sliver of
| truth in that.
|
| But I think the type of leadership this essay talks about comes
| from personality traits that are mostly determined by the end of
| one's adolescence: grit, obsessiveness/perfectionism, and vision.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Let's just be careful: whether it's Steve Jobs or Paul Graham or
| Socrates, philosophy devolves to sophistry when the metric is
| whether you can convince people. The metric has to be whether
| you're right, in this case for the business.
|
| The solution here, like most dialectics, is to do both: hire
| people who are not just smart, but who actually care for their
| part of the business in a way founders wish they could do if they
| had the time, intelligence, and grace.
|
| As a non-founder, I'm so glad when the founders hire someone who
| cares enough to get their job done that I can rely on them and
| focus on my job -- and I aspire to be someone who others are glad
| to rely on. But from even two steps away, that is
| indistinguishable from the principles of division of labor and
| the practice of mutual political respect that strangle companies
| in bureaucracy. But the two situations are night and day, and
| obvious to those who live it.
|
| So I think the difference is not whether the founder can reach
| down a level, but whether they -- or the COO or whoever plays
| this role -- can arrive on any scene and quickly tell if it's BS.
| Then when everyone knows BS is not safe and that commitment is
| respected, they'll find the courage to not play games.
|
| So then a company runs well not because the founder is good, but
| because people understand and buy into what good means for the
| business.
| nstart wrote:
| I know it's unlikely but it would be great if this talk could be
| shared on YouTube (if it isn't already. I couldn't find it when I
| checked earlier). There are the occasional talks from founders
| that turn out to be timeless. Would love for ycombinator to take
| a bet on this one and see how it pans out.
| abhinai wrote:
| Unfortunately it was not recorded. We were all wishing it were
| recorded. PG asked me to write down everything I could remember
| before I forgot.
| jchook wrote:
| Where can we read it?
| cm11 wrote:
| I'm very much in line with the the gist of what's being said
| here. That said, there are a couple of discrepancies I think.
|
| First, I don't think Founder Mode works as a name. He's saying
| all the founders are being told to grow their company the wrong
| way--the Manager Mode way. Chesky is unique in that he's ignoring
| them. Most Founders are doing Manager Mode not "Founder" Mode.
|
| It's possible the name could work because it describes what
| Founders should be doing rather than what they're currently
| doing. It's meant to capture that people who start a company have
| a much different interest and emotional investment in the mission
| and company. This distinction is important (and has been told
| many times). I'm not sure that model holds so tight anymore.
| Being a tech founder today is a mainstream and maybe default path
| today for many, it's not a weird one that you'd have to be crazy
| about what you're trying to build in order to attempt. Founders
| are choosing founding first and searching for ideas second, and
| then pivoting those ideas as a best practice of founding.
|
| Pick a random company that's sent you a recruitment email--look
| at what they say they do and then ask yourself how many people
| might be excited about that. Take an interview with a small one,
| you have a good chance you'll talk to a founder or someone quite
| high--this person frequently does not seem interested in this.
| Even without a successful product or an exit, the VC round is
| paying them a good salary to startup. A recent thought I've been
| having is there's a little more opportunity now to treat founding
| as a salary job, not really an equity play.
|
| "As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to
| run the company in a certain way for it to scale." The
| problematic norm to me in tech is the opting for organizing
| functionally (dividing into engineering, design, marketing. etc.)
| to scale. Related to this is the problem with PMs at most
| companies. If they're good ones, they should be leaders. Yet they
| don't own much nor manage anyone (they're ICs with no reports).
| And so Chesky removed them or guided them to something more
| specific like PMM.
| blackoil wrote:
| I think idea boils down to know enough of your companies and
| subordinates' work and working to smell any bullshit they try to
| peddle. If founder does that, it trickles down as all under them
| will have to know enough about things below them to keep up.
|
| In Joel Spolsky's blog about his Excel review by Bill Gates.
| Gates knew enough about Excel/123 and company to make sure if the
| person knows what he is talking about. Same can be said for
| 6-page memo culture of Amazon.
| kapad wrote:
| Both the examples cited here, Airbnb and Apple, have been through
| difficult times as a result of "manager mode failure".
|
| In other words, "founder mode" worked after a failure of "manager
| mode".
|
| Yet, would Apple even had continued to exist to this day had
| Steve not been fired?
|
| From the essay, one thing is obvious, "founder mode" looks very
| different for a 20 person company than it does for a 2000 person
| company.
|
| > 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.
|
| The question that I have is, "is it possible for a founder to
| discover what 'founder mode' is for a 2000 person company,
| without going through some form of 'manager mode' as the company
| scaled from 20 to 2000"?
|
| What would be even more interesting is comments from
| founders/employees of startups where "founder mode" persisted as
| the company scaled up from 20 employees. Were these companies
| successful? Do they continue operating successfully?
| vinay_ys wrote:
| There's a fundamental point missing in this analysis. That is the
| difference in skin in the game and upside/downside game theory
| dynamics for people involved. An early "founder" by definition
| has a lot of upside and very little downside and have a lot of
| ownership. And hence they behave in a particular way. They are
| actually taking very little risk.
|
| A late stage founder or a professional manager ceo has amassed
| stuff that they can lose more easily than stuff they potentially
| can gain. To continue to behave in the same way, they must be
| willing to take a lot of risk. And a lot of normal people don't
| want to take such risks.
|
| Only really crazy people - be it a founder or a professional
| manager - will disregard game theory dynamics and work against
| their own apparent self-interest and take huge risks. And they
| tend to expect people around them to take similar huge risks
| along with them. We call them unreasonable people. And only
| really unreasonable people can make huge changes in society. This
| is by definition true because only such people will behave in an
| outlier manner, and if they do so with a huge amount of capital
| and power in their control, they can change societies in big
| ways. If we think that is working well, we celebrate them; and if
| we think it is horrible, we write cautionary tales about them. It
| is possible to have both perceptions to be held by different
| groups of people at the same time.
|
| All the rest about hiring good people and letting them do etc is
| all just details of dynamics emanating from this unreasonable
| risk taking ability a person can manifest. I don't believe this
| can be turned into a playbook that can be taught in a management
| school. Management schools already teach how to take risks such
| that downside doesn't befall on the person who went to management
| school and instead falls on others. Everyone can subconsciously
| sense this about MBAs and hence the reaction they get. As
| companies become big and have a lot of external players with skin
| in the game (aka stakeholders) who are at a distance, they want
| these MBA types to manage that risk in such a way that it doesn't
| befall them. That's fundamentally very different from a founder
| who is not at a distance, but within. Still, founders also do the
| same when it is them vs their employees. In this aspect, it is
| all relative.
| cutemonster wrote:
| I think you're forgetting this:
|
| "often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let
| them drive the company into the ground."
|
| That's not low risk, that's higher risk. Letting the founders
| continue in Founder Mode can be _both_ lower risk, and higher
| expected value, at the same time.
|
| > hiring good people and letting them do etc is all just
| details of dynamics emanating from this unreasonable risk
| taking ability
|
| I think not. Instead, the founders have unique insights: in the
| product, in the business domain, in the people in the company -
| which lets them do Founder Mode things a professional CEO
| cannot.
|
| Sth else:
|
| > only really unreasonable people can make huge changes in
| society.
|
| Nice way of phrasing it :-)
| vinay_ys wrote:
| > That's not low risk, that's higher risk. Letting the
| founders continue in Founder Mode can be both lower risk, and
| higher expected value, at the same time.
|
| It depends on how the founder and their investors perceive
| risk. If they have the risk appetite to stay in founder mode
| at scale, even when they have a lot to lose, then they do.
| But most don't. That's my point. And so, they take the advise
| to derisk for themselves - they take some money off the
| table, they hire professional managers and delegate, they
| take their new found time and money and put it elsewhere.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I feel like Amazon is a great case in point - Bezos exercised
| direct command-and-control of all major initiatives for his
| entire tenure at the helm.
|
| Delegation was obviously in play, but responsibility was never
| diffused. At the end of the day, there was a direct chain of
| responsibility from you all the way up to Bezos, and he wouldn't
| hesitate to send one of his personal fixers in if things were
| going off the rails in a particular branch of the organisational
| tree.
| philwelch wrote:
| That's an interesting observation because Jeff Bezos also
| seemed to delegate a lot. It seemed that the S-team (Amazon's
| term for their top executives) basically ran the entire
| company, which admittedly frees up a lot of Jeff's time to
| focus on whatever seems most important to him.
|
| I also hadn't heard about him sending fixers in; was that an
| escalation to sending a question mark email or was it part of
| the normal process? I know you're probably aware of this but
| for other people reading this discussion I feel I should
| elaborate: if some problem at Amazon, usually customer-facing
| and often a complaint from an actual customer, landed in Jeff's
| inbox and caught his attention, he would forward the email to
| whoever was responsible for the situation, adding "?" as his
| sole commentary. I think he just forwarded the email to one of
| the S-team and it would get passed down the org chart until it
| reached the relevant manager but everyone in that chain would
| keep the issue at front of mind until it was resolved. And if
| you were the manager that actually owned the issue, it was now
| your top priority. The expectation was that not only would you
| address the customer's immediate problem but that you would
| root-cause the problem and address it as categorically as
| possible.
|
| Come to think of it, maybe this is a good example of founder
| mode.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| well, then founder mode is a meaningless thing because the
| essay seemed to suggest doing the opposite of "think he just
| forwarded the email to one of the S-team and it would get
| passed down the org chart until it reached the relevant
| manager"
| philwelch wrote:
| My understanding is that Jeff Bezos would remain involved
| in the followup
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Yeah, the key bit here is that you would remain under the
| microscope till you could demonstrate to the entire
| management chain that the problem was actually solved -
| and with the Bezos question mark came an implicit
| guarantee that the resources/authority to actually solve
| issue would be made available.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| all this implies trust in the management team, right? to
| tell Bezos that it's really solved. The opposite of what
| the essay is arguing, that these managers tend to be
| fakers and can't be trusted.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Indeed. And I think the essay comes with the implicit
| assumption that founders are bad at spotting snake-oil
| execs (which may be warranted in general, but isn't in
| Amazon's case)
| philwelch wrote:
| Except it doesn't sound like his style was to "trust the
| management team to tell him that it's really solved". It
| sounds like his style was to "dive deep" and make sure
| the problem was solved. If you put in the work and
| understand the business deeply enough, nobody's going to
| successfully bullshit you.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Bezos delegated, but he also followed up aggressively, and
| the whole company reporting structure was designed to enable
| that.
|
| When I worked there, Bezos held a weekly S-team meeting where
| the execs all came fully briefed to answer any questions
| about ongoing issues in their departments. That flowed on
| down the chain: Andy Jassy had an AWS-wide meeting the day
| before to gather the relevant data from each of his teams,
| and that meant that every major AWS team had an internal
| rollup meeting on Mondays to prepare for Jassy's meeting...
|
| Most of the question mark emails seemed to target more
| specific issues (mostly customer pain points). The fixers
| were more for big organisational or tech problems. If your
| division was significantly behind schedule on a product
| launch, or your production system had significant failure
| rates, you were liable to have a Senior Principal engineer
| and/or a new VP airdropped into your org, with significant
| leeway to get shit done
| swisniewski wrote:
| Ben Horowitz talks about this in "The Hard Thing about Hard
| Things". He uses the metaphor of an Offensive Lineman and the
| concept of "giving ground begrudgingly".
|
| His core concept is that one should slowly delegate
| responsibility. Not delegating anything is like the Offensive
| Lineman standing still. In that case the defense just runs around
| around you.
|
| Instead he suggests that you move back slowly, offering
| resistance the way an O-Line does.
|
| This seems very complimentary to what Paul mentioned.
| koliber wrote:
| It's surprising that this is surprising.
|
| Every conversation loses information. Something is always lost in
| translation, even among excellent communicators. If you only rely
| on your direct reports to get information about your organization
| you will be flying blind. This will happen in situations where
| everyone has the purest intentions. Add on top politics and
| personal interests and the problem compounds.
|
| Here are a few tools I've used to get a richer understanding of
| what's going: - skip level one on ones -
| metrics - using the product as a user - occasionally
| looking at a few "low level" artifacts like customer support
| threads, slack conversations, PR reviews, or user stories.
|
| You're essentially doing a virtual walk-around. Imagine in a
| physical plant, once a week, the CEO walks around the fence
| perimeter, through the stock rooms, observes the gate for a few
| minutes, walks the factory floor inconspicuously, makes herself
| coffee in the back cafeteria, and uses the warehouse bathroom.
| While she does this she occasionally asks a question here or
| there, praises a good effort, and very visibly picks up a piece
| of trash. It's possible to do a similar thing virtually.
|
| The observations from the above activities are invaluable sources
| of information. You cross reference it with what your direct
| reports tell you. You challenge them based on your first hand
| observations. Ask a lot of questions, and when they can't answer
| them, encourage them to also become more intimately involved in
| their part of the organization.
|
| No single perspective is enough to understand what's going on
|
| This is not micromanagement. This is being aware.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| "management by walking around" is definitely a thing.
|
| Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your
| experience with it, mostly.
| Propelloni wrote:
| There is even a name for it: Gemba Walk, a LEAN practice.
|
| Management self-help guru Tom Peters (of In Search of
| Excellence fame) built a whole method around it, called
| Management by Walking Around. It differs from Gemba Walking in
| lacking a specific focus.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about
| how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-
| meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a
| certain way for it to scale."
|
| I looked up this company Airbnb. I always used VRBO, which
| predates Airbnb by over a decade. I booked entire houses months
| in advance for extended stays.
|
| According to this blog post Airbnb grew. But the stock is down
| over 8% even after the latest market rally. What's going on.
|
| The question I have is what Airbnb grew into. The company has
| been around for a while. I let Big Tech show me the latest news.
| I did not ask for negative news, just any news.
|
| Below is what I got. I must be missing why this Airbnb CEO is
| doing a good job and is worth listening to in spite the company's
| name appearing in all of this bad press.
|
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevj77rdp89o
|
| https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article291610590.html
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vrbo-nick-saban-ad-trolling-2...
|
| https://www.kake.com/home/city-of-wichita-looking-to-add-law...
|
| https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2024/08/26/man-shot...
|
| https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/crime/2024/...
|
| https://globalnews.ca/news/10723835/airbnb-hidden-camera-san...
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/restoration-train-car-airbnb...
|
| https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/love-humor/airbnb-moun...
|
| https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/jail-sentence-sought-for...
|
| https://www.wxxv25.com/four-arrested-after-shooting-at-gulfp...
|
| https://nypost.com/2024/08/20/lifestyle/i-stayed-in-a-1-a-ni...
|
| https://buffalonews.com/news/local/business/gov-kathy-hochul...
|
| https://www.summitdaily.com/opinion/letter-to-the-editor-fri...
|
| It goes on. The reply will likely be "The reason is ... and this
| has nothing to do with Airbnb. Airbnb is doing fine. I love
| Airbnb. And so on." This is a forum sponsored by the Silicon
| Valley VC firm that financed Airbnb so I expect HN commenters
| will defend the company's actions or inaction.
| taurath wrote:
| Crush your faking employees is the advice of the day. Founders
| are superheroes who can do no wrong and miss no context! Founders
| favoritism leading to being in an in-crowd never attracts faking
| employees, and the founders can famously always tell!
|
| Never heard the nonsense idea that it's good or frequent advice
| to step back and let people do their thing in a startup.
| luigi23 wrote:
| Strawman comment
| peter_vukovic wrote:
| For every example of a company that bounced back due to "founder
| mode", there is an opposite example of a company saved by
| "manager mode".
|
| The modes don't exist. You either figure out how to effectively
| manage the company in front of you, or you don't.
| DistantCl3ric wrote:
| I see employees and founders fall into different categories
| depending on when they join.
|
| Founders and first group of employees are the creators. The ones
| who often care deeply and want to bring new ideas to life,
| creating value for customers (and eventually shareholders) -
| Higher risk for this group.
|
| As the company grows but is still early on the journey, the next
| group tends to also care and often want to protect whats been
| built while helping creating new value. This group likely wants
| to earn a bit more having joined later. This group are taking
| less risk as there are likely already a few rounds raised at this
| point.
|
| The company continues to grow and starts hire more staff to help
| it operate at scale. These people are disconnected and tend to
| arrive to extract more value than the groups before them. These
| are often managers or extra execs, more sales teams on commission
| etc.
|
| This new group is not here to defend whats built and often arent
| as invested in the idea. They didnt join out of a burning desire
| to see the world get better - they are here to earn well and push
| their careers.
|
| I think this is where founder mode helps. It keeps the ones who
| care deeply about the business, the idea, the customers, the
| world, the employees etc in the know. They keep their finger on
| the pulse and can help steer everyone away from just chasing
| personal gain. They can bring back the guiding principles that
| may have been diluted through various levels of "those who don't
| care as much".
|
| I think early employees - those taking the most risk aside from
| the founders - could also be leveraged here. In fact, I think
| those early employees could be considered mini-founders if they
| are are still around at later stages.
| erichmond wrote:
| Most tech companies are terrible at hiring "managers". I agree
| with Paul's premise, but the solution to micromanage is missing
| the point. If companies hired actual manager/leaders, they would
| see better outcomes.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| correct. the last thing that a company needs is a CEO who
| doesn't empower his direct reports, can't hire good ones,
| thinks they are all fakers and tries to meddle in every detail,
| instead of thinking about where the company is going and where
| it should go and how it should get there.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/0ec0fcf8-c284-4f50-a452-04ca94911a...
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Has anyone broken more laws in more jurisdictions that Brian
| Chesky?
| Nevermark wrote:
| A founder (or strong leader) habitually has a clear vision of
| where they want to be tomorrow that is not obvious from looking
| at the company today.
|
| The process of fulfilling that vision requires open exploration,
| a willingness to go places along the way they didn't expect, and
| to continue looking ahead.
|
| It isn't constrained by current products, markets or customers.
| The memory of how the current company came from something
| seemingly much less remains fresh.
|
| It is much more of an idiosyncratic winding journey, but
| potentially more impactful, than iteratively looking for paths
| that bump numbers.
| thntk wrote:
| It's not founder mode or manager mode. I think it is just about
| effective management.
|
| When starting up, the founder needs to (1) know what should be
| done, (2) be able to do it themself, and (3) do it and confirmed
| it's done. When scaling up, the founder still needs to (1) know
| what should be done, (2') know who are able to do it, and (3')
| arrange for those to do it and confirm it's done.
|
| What is called manager mode is just a failure in either (1), (2)
| or (3). And what is called founder mode is just trying to remedy
| such failures by exerting themself instead of fixing the
| structure, thus, also not effective.
| baxtr wrote:
| I'm afraid the whole piece is missing a framework like yours.
|
| It looks very selectively at one successful category of
| enterprises and then generalizes this onto all.
|
| But:
|
| What about all those founder mode companies that went terribly
| wrong?
|
| What about all the companies that function well in "non-
| founder" mode? Apple today is a perfect example.
|
| I don't think it's about founder/non-founder either but about
| some underlying fundamental principles that PG hasn't figured
| out yet.
| narnarpapadaddy wrote:
| I agree with this. In my experience, if your "good people" are
| running your business into the ground, you just didn't hire
| good people. The challenge is that hiring "good people" is
| incredibly difficult. It's also actually fairly hard to get
| released once onboard. If the company is in the black, even if
| growth is far below where a founder or investor wants to be,
| stakeholders are reluctant to make changes.
|
| Baseball recruiters have the advantage that they can go watch a
| pitcher toss a few balls. For most roles in a company you can't
| get that direct knowledge of someone's skills prior to hiring.
| After hiring someone who is actually an expert needs to sit
| with the new hire and assess them critically.
|
| As a founder, sit in the first several meetings with the new
| sales guy. Did they come prepared knowing who to talk to? What
| their budget likely was? What their pain points likely were?
| Did they hear what the client asked and respond accordingly? Or
| did they did misunderstand the domain, need, request, etc.? Did
| they leave with notes and follow-up items? If you didn't come
| away impressed release them and move on. After 3 or 5 meetings
| you'll have confidence that they are the right fit.
|
| After that, let them do their job and move on to addressing the
| next challenge. Once someone has shown themselves to be a good
| hire, protect them.
| halfcat wrote:
| > _After that, let them do their job and move on_
|
| Yes, for the most part. But also: _trust but verify_
|
| Figure out how much time you can spend on re-verifying, and
| do it in a random sampling basis. This will look different
| depending on the roles, but it's whatever you need to do to
| verify, first-hand, the job is still being done correctly.
|
| This will likely be a very small percent of your time, but
| the key is that it needs to be non-zero.
| abhinai wrote:
| Have you ever run a company or are you just sharing opinions
| based on what you "think" should be done?
| narnarpapadaddy wrote:
| I have founded and "exited" 3 startups, 2 of which ended in
| bankruptcy. :)
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Even though PG is purposely being a bit circumspective with
| respect to the characteristics of founder mode, I believe that it
| is safe to say that founders, rather than managers, are more
| likely to be:
|
| - emotionally involved - visionary or pioneering - optimistic -
| gritty or determined - domain experienced - competitive - strong
| negotiators - strong communicators - self-starting (priority
| setters) - intuitive, and - self-assured (perceived experts)
|
| I'm sure others will disagree with this list inone way or
| another, but I have mentored, counseled and invested in startups
| for 15 years; I have dozens of friends who started companies; and
| I founded a successful company myself. Most if not all of these
| characteristics are present in the founders I know who have been
| successful.
|
| If you want to start a business, and you are not a person well
| described by these characteristics--then my advice is to get more
| work experience and find opportunities (in or out of work) to
| develop these characteristics in yourself.
|
| When the time comes for you to talk with investors--let alone the
| need for these skills to found your startup--these are the
| qualifications and qualities in you that they will be looking
| for.
| regularfry wrote:
| Whether or not that group of characteristics is true, there is
| another factor which is that a founder doesn't have to convince
| anyone of their own management style to get hired. They don't
| have to play a part, to pretend to buy into professional
| management class cultural markers. As a result they'll end up
| in a position that they would never be hired into because their
| ideas would sound wrong to the people doing the hiring.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Not sure if I agree with the sentiment here or not, I'll need to
| ponder it longer, but just wanted to say that I worked at a large
| company that did the "CEO with non-manager conversation" thing.
| At Advanced Micro Devices, in the late 80's and early 90's, both
| the CEO and the COO would have lunches with random employees from
| the lower ranks, I assume to get stories from outside their
| bubble.
|
| AMD was successful in some ways in those days, and unsuccessful
| in others, so I'm not sure what conclusion to draw here, except
| that it wasn't so unique for Steve Jobs to have contact with the
| lower ranks in order to get feedback from outside his bubble.
| pulse7 wrote:
| Cofounder of a well-known startup accelerator and venture capital
| firm tells us the truth: we (still) don't know why companies are
| successful and how they are managed best ...
| max_ wrote:
| Yes. But we can absolutely in if they are being run badly
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| I don't know, consider me skeptical. My last company was a start-
| up with a solid product-market fit and lots of building interest
| from prospective customers. We had a CEO and CTO, both
| cofounders, who were operating in what it sounds like is being
| described as "founder mode" here. Very hands on and opinionated
| on implementation details would be the polite way of describing
| it. The less kind version is that they were meddling
| micromanagers, out of their depth in the areas they forcefully
| inserted themselves, and frequently subject to delusions of
| grandeur. A bunch of product and technical decisions were made
| that many of us saw as being fatally flawed and pushed back
| against and were overruled. We were saddled with dead end product
| implementations that failed to meet what the founders had
| envisioned and came with crushing tech debt. We went from being
| positioned to win what was clearly a newly emerging category, to
| scrambling to put out fires and being in constant crisis mode.
| All the while CEO would send out think-pieces to the team on his
| take on why our efforts were failing to achieve his vision, while
| never once recognizing that the things the team had warned him
| about were being realized exactly as predicted. Employee churn
| was high, as people were fired out of nowhere for "poor
| performance", to be replaced by new hires that the CEO was very
| high on, only for them to be crushed by the same factors that had
| crushed everyone else. Eventually the wheels came off the wagon
| and the company failed. Someone is going to build a successful
| version of that product, but it won't be us.
|
| Paul Graham here claims that C-level types are all professional
| liars and that the ideas behind standard management strategy is
| worthless. I agree. Where I disagree is the idea that founders
| are any different. They are just a different flavor of the same
| thing. This concept of founders mode is just another nice-
| sounding theory that can never be proved, that makes for
| captivating talks and blog posts and eventually management books
| but will fail to produce anything with any kind of consistency.
| It's the yet another cargo-cult trend for the group desperate to
| prove they are the next Steve Jobs.
|
| I'm not even sure I buy into the Steve Jobs mythos. Every random
| process will have statistical outliers for no other reason than
| randomness, but hey become canonized and their words and lives
| are studied like scripture and we try to divine the path to
| emulate them. Many of us understand that top performing hedge
| fund managers are statistical flukes that are getting lucky
| rather than systemically beating the market. But we hold out
| against the idea that startups and founders are a similarly
| chaotic system. I wonder if it's because this is a forum for
| startups and not hedge funds?
| tcgv wrote:
| Over my ten-year journey as a co-founder, my partners and I have
| twice decided to hire "expert" senior managers with proven track
| records from renowned companies to help us grow. Both times, this
| not only resulted in a waste of money due to their high
| compensation but also a waste of time and energy. Onboarding and
| managing them took significant effort, yet they failed to deliver
| meaningful results. Eventually, they left, and we realized that
| while they had been successful in large organizations with
| thousands of employees, our smaller, 100-person company may
| lacked the structure they were used to for delivering results.
|
| We concluded that they were high-level managers with little
| hands-on experience, accustomed to having large teams to execute
| their plans. They were often slow to recognize their lack of
| progress, or didn't recognize it at all, and frequently spoke
| about the need for more "strategic" actions when what we really
| needed was to focus on executing key priorities.
|
| So I related to PG's post.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| > Eventually, they left, and we realized that while they had
| been successful in large organizations with thousands of
| employees, [...]
|
| You don't really believe that, do you?
| tcgv wrote:
| You're right that PG's piece suggests they probably weren't
| as successful or impactful in their previous roles as their
| references claimed. But we can never be entirely sure. I also
| don't dismiss our responsibility as co-founders for the
| decision and how it was implemented under our leadership.
| thntk wrote:
| Have you tried hiring or rotating internal people just for
| solving specific (management) tasks? It is like the "just-in-
| time" style in Japanese corps.
| tcgv wrote:
| We haven't tried that yet, but it's an interesting idea.
|
| I'm the technical co-founder. Under me, we have three squads.
| Two of them are led by managers who were promoted internally
| from individual contributor roles. These managers still do
| some hands-on coding occasionally when needed, but they
| primarily focus on delegating tasks to their teams as much as
| possible. The third squad has a manager without coding
| responsibilities, whom we hired to test a new squad
| structure. It's been going really well--his squad is
| performing excellently, and I've been able to delegate some
| cross-functional tasks that used to fall on me, like
| collaborating with the sales team when clients have technical
| requirements for renewing their accounts or documenting
| releases and bug fixes to share within the company.
|
| So in terms of the technology area of our company, our lower-
| level managers are performing considerably well. We're
| implementing frameworks and routines that are really helping
| to advance our company's managerial maturity. We're also
| working to apply these practices to other, less structured
| areas, so your proposal could be very timely.
| ai4ever 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
|
| Nope, not true in my book. I would not like to be in any company
| that "selects" a small group of elites to a hawaii or las-vegas
| "retreat". then, said elites would propagate their new-found
| retreat wisdom from their cult-leader down to the plebs.
| NhanH wrote:
| Then you would not be one of the most important people in that
| company anyway.
|
| Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with that, but
| commitment goes both way.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is the Chesterton'a Fence applied to running companies. It's
| somewhat dark-comedy counterpart is the "always has been" meme.
|
| You also have to take into account the % of bad actors involved
| online and elsewhere who want to misdirect you, misguide you, and
| ultimately to make you fail. Healthy skepticism and distrust
| helps a lot.
| miltava wrote:
| Does anyone know if the presentation is public? I'd love to get a
| deeper understanding about what the founder mode is.
|
| I agree with Graham about the management mode described being a
| very bad (trusting "professional" managers and being completely
| hands off from their responsibilities). And being a founder
| myself who saw it working first hand at the acquirer of my last
| company, I see that management in this mode is not worried about
| the company long term success.
|
| But I'm not sure how founder mode is new or how this is different
| from what Andy grove suggests in High output management. Among
| other things, he says that the supervisor should be more or less
| hands on depending on the "task relevant maturity" of her direct
| reports.
|
| Maybe by seeing the presentation it would be clearer.
|
| Thanks
| jedberg wrote:
| I've spoken to founders about this before, and pointed out
| something that not a single one of them had thought of until I
| pointed it out:
|
| The founder of the company stands to make generationally life
| changing money, the people they hire do not.
|
| Founder mode works because the founders are willing to spend
| every waking moment on work. They have time to get into the
| details of everything. And it's worth it for them because success
| could mean billions. It could mean they are set for life, as is
| the next 10 or 100 generations of their family.
|
| Steve Jobs -- Billionaire. Brian Chesky -- also a billionaire.
| Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang . Basically anyone you
| would name as successfully running a company in founder mode is
| most likely a billionaire. It's worth it to them to scarface
| everything to spend every waking moment on work.
|
| But the people they hire don't have that incentive. Especially
| not anymore, with the way VCs are getting better at extracting
| value from companies. Exits for early employees aren't nearly
| life changing as they used to be, and exits for later employees
| at the stages we are talking about here are even worse.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Can summarize this as once the standard MBAs come in, tech
| companies 50/50 go down the drain. They'll often survive and
| return shareholder value, but won't be a place worth working
| beyond rest and vest.
|
| Or, they are where to play the game with some other sociopaths
| who know the silly rules are silly but lead to great TC if you
| play (and somewhere in the background there's a company/product).
| Rinse/repeat because the median HBS grad needs a job somewhere!
|
| I am surprised it apparently took a groundbreaking speech for a
| very experienced VC to grok this.
| dctoedt wrote:
| Sounds like Admiral Rickover's management principles. [0]
|
| [0] https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm
| calmbonsai wrote:
| I'm late to this post and maybe I'm missing a good deal of
| implied context, but what specific "results" mentioned by
| Mr.Chesky were "disastrous"?
|
| Without units on these "results" I have, literally, no measure to
| these implied figure(s) of merit being derived from a specific
| management style.
|
| Additionally, depending on one's personal perspective and
| context, the same figures could be wonderful or horrible.
|
| I will proffer, in a prior very successful (angel to S1) org,
| short (< 15min) skip-level meetings were the norm and it was
| considered "odd" to even schedule a meeting (outside of all-
| hands) with more than 2 other people.
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