[HN Gopher] What is "founder mode"?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       What is "founder mode"?
        
       Author : nqureshi
       Score  : 60 points
       Date   : 2024-10-07 21:37 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tomblomfield.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tomblomfield.com)
        
       | jsifalda wrote:
       | Thanks for sharing! Good take.
       | 
       | There is also this checklist I used to use for more "practical
       | references" https://www.craftengineer.com/the-founder-mode-used-
       | by-brian...
        
         | henning wrote:
         | like everything else coming from startup people, none of this
         | means anything.
         | 
         | none of the items listed there preclude a CEO from only talking
         | to direct reports and viewing the org chart as a set of black
         | boxes that their reports are responsible. having "engineering
         | and design report to the founder" doesn't mean anything. is
         | that saying everyone who does engineering and design has an
         | executive as their manager?
         | 
         | nothing in that list talks about hiring or firing practices.
         | 
         | whomever wrote this post would have great success as an object-
         | oriented clean code thought leader, where their skills at
         | saying nothing would earn them slots at conferences and social
         | media followers.
        
       | Aurornis wrote:
       | > At Monzo, we experimented with some pretty wacky management
       | structures at times. There was a period when our middle managers
       | were basically just responsible for "pastoral care" of each
       | employee. They were not connected at all with the output that the
       | ICs were producing. It was totally insane and overlapped with our
       | period of lowest productivity by far.
       | 
       | Funny - I took a manager role where the company was trying this
       | approach. I was the manager, but I wasn't empowered to manage the
       | team or their work. They had a lot of feel-good ideas about
       | empowering employees and reducing the role of managers.
       | 
       | It had the same result. Lowest productivity period of my career,
       | for the entire company. It turns out there is some value to
       | traditional management structures when implemented properly.
       | Nearly all of the companies that experiment with weird management
       | structure ideas seem to discover this eventually, and either
       | revert to traditional management structures or they get built up
       | in the shadows via social standing within the company.
        
         | settsu wrote:
         | > Lowest productivity period of my career, for the entire
         | company
         | 
         | "Productivity" is a nebulous concept in knowledge work. So
         | unless you're referring to a factory with a very concrete,
         | measurable output, this isn't particularly meaningful term.
         | 
         | How was the quality and employee satisfaction (as shown by
         | solicited feedback or subjective anecdotes, plus
         | attrition/turnover, etc.)?
        
           | Aurornis wrote:
           | It was low productivity as in we didn't really accomplish
           | anything. Teams couldn't figure out what to build because it
           | was forbidden for managers to direct them.
           | 
           | Happiness was down too because everyone just wanted to work,
           | but we had these obscure rules about who could decide what
           | was worked on (not managers) that turned into roadblocks to
           | getting anything done across teams.
           | 
           | This wasn't a case where "productivity" was an abstract
           | metric that wasn't measuring the right thing. It was just
           | gridlock where nothing was getting done because nobody was
           | allowed to be empowered to direct things.
        
             | settsu wrote:
             | Oof, certainly sounds like a miserable train wreck.
             | 
             | These are the sort of ideas that, at best, seem like they
             | should be explored with an isolated R&D approach, or simply
             | left to academics.
             | 
             | And, if they are executed realtime with a companies
             | mainline workforce and somehow succeed, it should be
             | clearly stated and understood that it was--like much
             | "success"--by no small amount of sheer luck (or
             | happenstance via uncontrolled factors, if you prefer),
             | force of will, and patience by the team as a whole, rather
             | than the usual narrative which is the inspired actions of
             | single prescient individual (who will then go on to write a
             | book and give TED Talks about an approach that absolutely
             | cannot be applied anywhere else and does not scale.)
        
             | travisjungroth wrote:
             | It can be hard or impossible to measure certain things, and
             | just as hard to pick the right measures. But, there are
             | also cases where you can say all reasonable measures are
             | worse in one instance than another. Less new ideas, less
             | happiness, less stuff going out the door, less bug fixes.
             | Especially possible when it's a time window comparison.
             | This sounds like one of those cases.
        
         | serial_dev wrote:
         | I got, what feels like, the most productive month of the year
         | behind me, because I thought that the data nerd top executives
         | flagged me because my GitHub stats were down and they keep an
         | eye on me. It turns out I took something as a hint from my
         | engineering manager that wasn't directed towards me, and my
         | stats were fine.
         | 
         | In the end they got increased productivity out of me because I
         | thought I was flagged in some faceless soulless nonsensical
         | "insights" dashboard.
         | 
         | And by productive I mean that I feel like I made more impactful
         | changes than usually, so I'm not referring to GitHub stats with
         | fake cheat PRs and changes.
        
       | debit-freak wrote:
       | To equity-holders, it's code for the obsession that makes
       | founders work extra-hard to please the financiers. To employees,
       | it's code for being an abusive asshole.
       | 
       | FWIW, I would never describe any of the (successful, with exits
       | and now-successful brands) founders I worked for this way. It's
       | disgusting.
       | 
       | It's been a long, long time since pg had to answer to employees.
       | He clearly no longer understands the current labor market, nor
       | what it implies about actual workplace conditions.
       | 
       | EDIT: To be clear, "obsessive" attention to detail is still what
       | makes products work coherently. It's the rhetoric that an
       | individual, even a "founder" taking on mountains of potential
       | value, should (or even can) shoulder and internalize this,
       | without breaking, that is inherently wrong.
        
         | notahacker wrote:
         | I think the most damning comment of all on "founder mode" came
         | not from the critics but from a LinkedIn post giving Brian
         | Chesky apparently sincere praise for purportedly examplifying
         | it. Apparently AirBNB had completely screwed up customer
         | support responses to a fellow founder to the extent they'd
         | blocked her, but _as she was a member of the YC alumni network_
         | , a quick message and Brian resolved her in a few minutes, at
         | the weekend. Who needs process or executive decision making at
         | lower levels when you have "founder mode"?!
         | 
         | Customer support mistakes are unavoidable in large companies
         | and AirBNB definitely isn't the worst offender in that regard,
         | but I can't really imagine a bigger example of dysfunction in a
         | B2C business than customer support resolution being the CEO
         | needing to respond to personal messages of customers well
         | connected enough to reach him via private channels. But now
         | customer support failure is actually something to aspire to,
         | provided it involves the important virtue of CEOs being busy at
         | weekends.
        
           | debit-freak wrote:
           | The behavior you've described seems deeply dysfunctional but
           | for reasons that are entirely separate from how the term
           | "founder mode" has gained a life of its own. "Founder mode"
           | is being weaponized to critique people for entering a market
           | much more competitive and dry of opportunity than it was
           | thirty years ago Without acknowledging any change in the
           | market the article at hand seems to be just a person belching
           | complaints without anything to say.
        
             | notahacker wrote:
             | Comparisons with the big internet successes of 25-30 years
             | ago are pretty wild anyway, on the basis that Google is
             | pretty much the poster child for tech founders letting a
             | professional manager install a hierarchy to do the running-
             | big-company stuff, and Pierre Omidyar not only left day to
             | day management as soon as eBay floated but also made a
             | point of moving out the Valley and portraying himself as a
             | philanthropist rather than a business leader.
             | 
             | The original essay felt more like scrabbling around for a
             | reason why founders felt their companies were less
             | effective with more levels of hierarchy whilst somehow
             | missing the essential truth that managing a team of 1000 is
             | harder than managing a team of 15 no matter how you do it.
             | I'm just here for all the wild takes on founder greatness
             | and founder obligation that came with it!
        
       | moomoo11 wrote:
       | Replace managers with AI
        
         | matthewsinclair wrote:
         | Someone should at least do the experiment and see what happens.
         | I can see it now: ChatCEO.
        
         | danielmarkbruce wrote:
         | I have some sense that it would work better than most CEOs. It
         | would require someone reasonably smart to build the system and
         | keep it fed with the right data etc, but the amount of decision
         | making and additional context as to why decisions are made etc
         | would be valuable, especially where CEOs are a bottle neck
         | (which is... a lot of places)
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | something jeff bezos always warned against was the "narrative
       | fallacy" - for one to believe so strongly in a compelling story
       | that they dont stop for data.
       | 
       | here's the stock charts of the founder of founder mode vs a
       | professional manager mode guy :)
       | 
       | https://x.com/ericnewcomer/status/1830998969490526423
       | 
       | just a fun reminder not to take everything as gospel.
       | 
       | to engage more substantively with TFA:
       | 
       | > I think the general pattern that Brian was identifying was the
       | following. A young, inexperienced founder with limited management
       | experience is running a rapidly scaling company. Famous VCs
       | invest a lot of money and join the board. Headcount passes 100
       | and quickly grows beyond 1000. The VCs (who often have never run
       | anything themselves) encourage the founder to hire "executives"
       | with "scaling experience". > > The founder is told to "empower"
       | these executives, who typically then implement techniques that
       | worked for them at previous companies. But, too often, these
       | techniques fail in the new company.
       | 
       | yes, i have worked at a company where this happened -- sans the
       | "quickly grows beyond 1000" - we never got there before our hired
       | gun execs made enough political moves to effectively kill the
       | company momentum. i dont know if our founder couldve righted the
       | ship by himself since he had his own issues to overcome, but i'm
       | 100% sure he would have been better off just having the hired
       | guns be advisors rather than management layers.
        
         | dvt wrote:
         | > here's the stock charts of the founder of founder mode vs a
         | professional manager mode guy :)
         | 
         | I've always told myself if I start a company that ever reaches,
         | say, 250+ employees, I'd step down. First, playing a management
         | game doesn't interest me (it's sort of like Risk vs Monopoly;
         | the former is fun, the latter I find boring). And second, I
         | just like _building_ things. I wish the meme /essay would be
         | about "builder mode" because I do think that's more of a thing
         | than "founder mode."
         | 
         | I also think, uncontroversially I'd wager, that the skillset is
         | just different. Building an MVP, finding product market fit,
         | pivoting, trying new things, failing, and doing it all over
         | (and over, and over) again is just absolutely fundamentally
         | different than running a large corporation, trying to maneuver
         | around market sentiment, dealing with politics, and so on.
        
           | octopoc wrote:
           | Wow this really hits home for me. I can do long stints at a
           | job but when I do I inevitably start building all kinds of
           | things on the side because that's what I love doing.
        
           | rgbrgb wrote:
           | I understand the sentiment but you may be overlooking how you
           | and your interests can change as the company scales. The
           | version of you running the 200 person company probably looks
           | different from the seed stage version and won't want to quit
           | at 250. That said, if you don't want to have a bunch of
           | people working for you, it seems kind of unlikely that you'll
           | find yourself in that position.
        
         | causal wrote:
         | This seemed like an obvious blindspot in the pg essay - if you
         | take the 0.1% most successful founders and put them in a room
         | together (which is the context of his essay) then of course
         | you're going to come away looking for that special ingredient
         | which makes these people so special.
         | 
         | It could just be luck. But you're not likely to learn much
         | without also talking to all the people who were just as
         | talented and still failed.
        
         | carabiner wrote:
         | Bezos also said, "When the anecdotes disagree with the data,
         | it's usually the anecdotes that are right"
        
           | robenkleene wrote:
           | The end of that quote is "there is something wrong with the
           | way that you are measuring your data". Which changes the
           | meaning of the quote (without it, it's "value anecdotes over
           | data", with it, it's "use inconsistencies with anecdotes to
           | identify problems with data".
        
         | debit-freak wrote:
         | Putting aside the inherent irrationality of stock charts for
         | measuring anything other than the markets' (wildly inaccurate)
         | interpretations of a topic, I agree with you. Rhetoric is a
         | rich-mans' stand-in for actual argumentation with evidence and
         | response to criticism.
        
         | concerndc1tizen wrote:
         | The two charts are basically identical except for Uber's last 6
         | months...
        
       | pdntspa wrote:
       | I am glad he is calling out the C-levels for their propensity to
       | lie and 'manage up'. This is a character trait that needs to be
       | annihilated. We should not be filtering for what is effectively
       | psychopathy.
       | 
       | I have watched so many amazing and sustainable products die
       | because someone let the MBAs in. After sitting through so much of
       | this crap dogma in my own business school classes, I would say
       | the vast majority of what they/we are taught is actively harmful
       | to most businesses.
        
         | BurningFrog wrote:
         | I don't like it more than you do, but it exists because it
         | works in practical reality.
         | 
         | To replace it you must come up with something that works even
         | better.
        
           | pdntspa wrote:
           | I disagree with this blocking tactic of "if you want to
           | complain about it you must come up with something better"
           | 
           | Like, yes, let me completely redo my entire life path so I
           | can redo one stupid argument.... I would love to, but I
           | wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth that gives me the
           | sapce to explore these things, and I have more practical
           | matters to attend to. Until then, we're going to be
           | complaining to anyone that would listen.
           | 
           | This is why we elect representatives to handle our
           | complaints. Except in the business world there are no
           | representatives and the regulatory bodies are actively made
           | toothless (by business interests), so the only prevailing
           | doctrine is the one that allows the people at the top to
           | steal ("capture") the most value from the process. Everyone
           | else can just go fuck themselves, amiright? This is a system
           | that needs to be destroyed.
        
       | codingwagie wrote:
       | Its forcing employees to create value, when they really just want
       | to collect compensation
        
       | blitzar wrote:
       | Its a grindset.
        
       | extr wrote:
       | Feels like I am taking crazy pills when I read about this stuff.
       | Like 1500 words that boil down to "make sure you're paying
       | attention to whether or not people are doing a good job".
        
         | alphakappa wrote:
         | It's also crazy that people are buying into the idea of
         | 'Founder Mode' when Airbnb is one of the companies that is very
         | much riding on the moat it created a while back while not doing
         | anything much that can even remotely be called customer-
         | obsessive (which is the lesson they could really learn from
         | Steve Jobs)
        
           | lotsofpulp wrote:
           | Airbnb being customer obsessive would involve much higher
           | labor expenses and liability, which would be counter to the
           | goal of its investors (especially investors from pre-IPO
           | days).
           | 
           | The goal is to make a business out of the higher margin parts
           | that scale easily, and leave the lower margin customer-
           | obsessive parts to others.
        
           | _puk wrote:
           | Anecdotally, in my friendship group, Airbnb in Europe seems
           | to be losing ground quite rapidly, especially from a mind
           | share perspective.
           | 
           | Prices are similar to hotels.com, with silly house rules,
           | cleaning fees and hassle vs just turning up and leaving.
           | 
           | I've used Airbnb for years, and it was truly revolutionary
           | back in the day.
        
           | nonameiguess wrote:
           | I would argue that, when you get to the scale of an Airbnb,
           | or Amazon, which is where I think the "customer-obsessive"
           | terminology comes from, you need to move beyond focusing
           | solely on your customers. Your business is having a social
           | impact. The house next door to me right now has had
           | contractors going in and out of it for the past three weeks
           | to remove and replace the entire interior because of damage
           | done by a short-term renter. Construction has absolutely
           | boomed around me but nearly all of the new units are becoming
           | short-term rentals. The neighborhood is either empty most of
           | the time, or full of drunken idiots making a bunch of noise,
           | getting the police called on them at 3 AM, and leaving the
           | streets and sidewalks full of trash and broken bottles.
           | 
           | Airbnb may very well be making its customers happy, but when
           | so many of those customers are 21 year-olds looking for party
           | houses they can trash and fundamentally changing the
           | character and safety of entire neighborhoods, is that really
           | the most important thing? Even as the founder or executive or
           | both of a business, you're still part of a human community
           | and you have a duty to that community not to worsen the lives
           | of countless bystanders in order to delight the few who
           | happen to pay you. Make products that are valuable in
           | general, to everybody, not products that are valuable only to
           | your customers at everyone else's expense.
        
         | tptacek wrote:
         | A lot of people, including people in attendance, do too. I
         | think the reason is that people read Paul Graham posts about
         | startup management as if they were written on stone tablets.
         | Sometimes I think he intends for them to be taken that way (and
         | in some cases, I think I get why), but this was not one of
         | those cases, and the discourse ran away with it.
         | 
         | That said: there's a real phenomenon Graham and Chesky were
         | grappling with, and if you've done startups for awhile ---
         | startups, in particular, because they give you the vantage
         | point of seeing a company's management processes develop from
         | zero --- you've almost certainly seen it yourself. Not enough
         | has been written about it! The point Graham was trying to make
         | isn't banal (or wrong).
         | 
         | It's just not fully formed, and is being taken that way.
        
           | extr wrote:
           | I've worked in startups a long time myself. Personally I've
           | never seen this problem, feels like it's advice literally
           | specifically for Chesky or maybe a founders at a couple dozen
           | other unicorns. In my experience it's a way more common
           | problem in the other direction. Founder can't let go of the
           | details and is mucking about in everyone's work. Or have
           | literally just become bored with the company and can't even
           | be bothered to hire the professional executives that are
           | supposedly such a problem. Perhaps a hot take, but IME most
           | professional executives/managers/MBA types are actually
           | pretty solid people to work with and do a good job.
        
             | tptacek wrote:
             | Both things are true: there are founders who lose Github
             | merge privileges and start meddling because they haven't
             | defined a long-term job for themselves, and there are most
             | definitely pasteurized processed business units that get
             | hired and run the exact same performative playbook at
             | startup after startup. It's not an either-or thing.
        
               | extr wrote:
               | I'm not saying that both don't exist, I'm just saying
               | PG's advice is so narrowly applicable as to be
               | effectively "bad advice" for most people reading it.
        
               | tptacek wrote:
               | As this article points out: Graham's article has probably
               | been misconstrued, and is best read as "this is something
               | you should consider and pay attention to", and not a
               | directive for everyone to go "be in founder mode". But to
               | be clear: I also don't think Graham's post is especially
               | good, though I think the issue he's engaging with is
               | important and widely slept on.
        
             | danielmarkbruce wrote:
             | There is an implicit assumption that the founder will make
             | good decisions. If someone is "mucking about" in everyone's
             | work, presumably it's phrased that way because they are
             | making a bunch of stupid decisions? Not much (there are
             | counter examples) will fix a ceo making dumb decision after
             | dumb decision.
        
         | IAmGraydon wrote:
         | It's actually worse than that. It's 1500 words that boil down
         | to "the hierarchical structure that powers the most powerful
         | companies, organizations and governments in the world and has
         | for hundreds of years is all bullshit. Believe me I am very
         | smart."
         | 
         | It's a complete clown show, but people love to believe stories
         | about people bucking the system, so they eat it up.
        
           | intelVISA wrote:
           | well the oft reality: I Made Lots of Money Exploiting H1Bs
           | You Can Trust Me Bro needs some artistic license before you
           | can sell yourself as a thought leader
           | 
           | pg gets a pass for building outsized value (YC pre 2020), but
           | the rest should probably not flex their luck and confuse it
           | with success and spare us their 'wisdom'
        
             | fakedang wrote:
             | > I Made Lots of Money Exploiting H1Bs You Can Trust Me Bro
             | 
             | Who dat?
        
       | nine_zeros wrote:
       | > Instead, I believe that great leaders have to be able to dig
       | into the details, have an incredibly high bar for quality, and
       | ultimately do great IC work themselves. Great managers have to
       | manage the work - they should primarily be responsible for
       | quality and speed of output. Managing people must be secondary to
       | managing the product.
       | 
       | If you are ever confused about founder-mode vs manager-mode, this
       | is the one single insight that you need to internalize.
       | 
       | Put in other words, the org needs leaders who drive from the
       | front. Not managers who build empires and run performance reviews
       | from the back.
       | 
       | Driving from the front involves looking at external-facing data -
       | customer happiness, features that land better, maintenance of
       | services - things that make the customers life better - whether
       | internal customer of external customer. They need to spend a lot
       | of time collaborating with peer leaders, distant leaders,
       | diagonal leaders, different departments regardless of anyone's
       | position in the org chart.
       | 
       | However, most large tech companies are filled with dogshit
       | management that tries to micromanage number of commits, meetings,
       | standups, Jira points, velocity, performance calibrations, stack
       | ranking, PIPs - aka inward looking things that are mostly set up
       | to catch their own people doing something. Also called politics -
       | personal gain triumphs all.
       | 
       | Even a 5th grader can tell you - practice makes perfect. And if
       | your leaders are practicing inward politics as opposed to outward
       | exploration and collaboration, you are getting exactly what they
       | are practicing - inward politics.
        
         | __loam wrote:
         | Most of us are confused by founder mode because Paul Graham
         | invented the term like a month ago.
        
       | cynicalpeace wrote:
       | Programmers love to name things, and then argue about the name.
       | 
       | For me, "founder mode" just means being extremely motivated to go
       | "harder, better, faster, stronger" (ala Daft Punk and Kanye).
       | 
       | You don't need to be a founder to be motivated and just because
       | you're a founder doesn't mean you're motivated. But the two
       | nicely line up.
       | 
       | Calling it founder mode has obviously been a great way to get
       | nerds to argue about it, so good on pg.
        
         | tempodox wrote:
         | Yep, the nerd sniping worked, and besides there's no such thing
         | as bad publicity.
        
       | intelVISA wrote:
       | Founder mode = drop out of Berkeley and copy paste open source
       | code?
       | 
       | I wonder if 'founder mode' is the antithesis to Agile as getting
       | shit done is against the manifesto (in practice).
        
       | fakedang wrote:
       | Somehow I feel that Paul Graham has contaminated the startup
       | discourse with his "Founder Mode" essay.
       | 
       | Not to mention, PG is taking the dangerous route and only looking
       | at a few data points (let's be honest, just one - Brian Chesky,
       | not even Joe or Nate) and trying to extrapolate that over the
       | rest of the domain.
       | 
       | According to PG, Sam was one of his favorite founder types a
       | decade earlier. How did that founder mode work out, except for a
       | failed startup, then having to kick him out of YC, and now
       | heading a startup where all the core team members left for
       | greener pastures? If Loopt did pan out, I'm sure PG would be
       | raving over Sam instead.
       | 
       | At this point, it's about time PG steps out of his inner circle
       | shell and actually meet some successful founders in the YC
       | community on the regular.
        
       | trunnell wrote:
       | Unlike PG's half-baked founder mode essay, this article is more
       | complete in describing what behaviors are successful during
       | scaling. It also matches my experience when Netflix was scaling
       | up the streaming business in the 2010-2016 era.
       | 
       | > how do good leaders stay in the detail and run great companies
       | at scale?
       | 
       | It's a relevant question not just for founders but for leaders at
       | every level.
       | 
       | IMO, one test for a "good leader" is whether they are capable of
       | doing the work 1 to 2 levels down into their teams. The more
       | familiarity they have, the more they are able to hire, fire, and
       | evaluate those people. After all, it's pretty hard to evaluate
       | work in an unfamiliar domain. Paradoxically, though, good leaders
       | do not contribute to that work directly. So how do they maintain
       | their skills if they don't do the work?
       | 
       | Consider the case of a front-line engineering manager with IC
       | engineer reports. A good one will know their team's codebase,
       | know where it could be easily extended and have good intuition
       | for the time required for any given feature idea. They know the
       | difference between good and bad code. But they NEVER submit PRs,
       | mostly because the maker schedule/manager schedule problem [1]
       | forces a choice of doing only one type of work well. (Every new
       | manager I've seen who wants to "spend 10-30% of their time
       | writing code" will either fail to support that code or fail to
       | support their team as a manager, when in a fast growing team or
       | company.)
       | 
       | The solution for eng. managers is to have the codebase on their
       | machine, be able to build and run it, and occasionally implement
       | their own experiments or POCs. These things NEVER go to
       | production. It's meant purely to maintain the manager's
       | familiarity with the codebase and staying current with their
       | team's output. (Hat tip to CW).
       | 
       | Note that we still don't have good labels for these behaviors.
       | "Hands on" and "hands off" confuses the issue-- is the example
       | above "hands on" or "hands off?" It's both and neither, because
       | those aren't useful labels.
       | 
       | There are other solutions for leaders higher up the org chart.
       | The article mentions _skip level 1:1s_ and _niche area deep
       | dives_ both with the purpose of _evaluating leadership
       | effectiveness._ When I did these, I 'd always start with setting
       | the same context: _I have two goals for this meeting and one non-
       | goal. I want to hear about what you 're working on, what's going
       | well and where the challenges are. I also want to answer any
       | questions you have about what's going on elsewhere in the
       | company. My non-goal is giving you specific direction, since
       | that's always between you and your manager. I'm just here to
       | gather and share information._
       | 
       | The role of a leader is to set goals, share context and ensure
       | the right team is in place, hiring and firing as needed. They
       | need to know what's going on from top to bottom in the teams they
       | lead, and in order to hire effectively, they need to be capable
       | of doing the work 1-2 levels below them. But they never actually
       | contribute 1-2 levels down, because that would severely undermine
       | the people they've delegated to.
       | 
       | I think this is why so many had a knee-jerk reaction to in PG's
       | founder mode essay, where he implied that founders have a special
       | ability to bypass management layers _and contribute directly_ (in
       | the Steve Jobs example). I 've seen it happen, and it failed 100%
       | of the time. 100%. After establishing some amount of managerial
       | structure -- wild guess would be after 50+ total employees --
       | contributing directly several layers down into your team is a
       | recipe for disaster. The puzzle is how to lead effectively
       | without making that mistake.
       | 
       | [1] maker schedule/manager schedule
       | https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html * Bonus behavior:
       | good managers are sensitive to booking meetings with any of their
       | team members who are on the maker schedule.
        
       | renewiltord wrote:
       | Founder mode is funny. There's definitely some companies that
       | benefit and there's others that don't, and it's not clear which
       | is which. But the term "founder mode" is so funny that we now use
       | it in my group of friends (of which the majority have started
       | software companies worth $xxx million) as an analogue for "going
       | ham".
       | 
       | On the basketball court, when someone's got a hot hand: Damn,
       | he's going founder mode.
       | 
       | At dinner, when someone devours a meal: I went founder mode on
       | that shit dude.
        
       | lol768 wrote:
       | An interesting read. I've been a Monzo customer ever since the
       | sign-up process was "come to the office and we'll give you your
       | card and help you get the Beta version of the app installed" and
       | it's been interesting, exciting (and sad, in some ways) to see it
       | grow and morph into what it is today.
       | 
       | Back then, you were more likely than not to get an engineer
       | dealing with your customer support queries. There was a Slack
       | community, a forum community and it felt very much like a scrappy
       | little start-up that was truly making a difference in what - in
       | the UK - had been an industry dominated by companies that didn't
       | really care about user experience or modern technology (I'd had
       | the misfortune of doing work for some of those banks). They even
       | had an API which customers could use to get their own data!
       | 
       | The pace of progress was rapid, too. I remember asking Tom if
       | he'd ever consider offering business current accounts, since the
       | competition was pretty dire at the time - the answer back then
       | was a "no, we're focussing on retail" - but I'm happy to use my
       | Monzo business account daily now!
       | 
       | I had the opportunity to work on a proposal and sit down with
       | some folks from one of Monzo's partnerships team a few weeks back
       | for a potential collaboration which ultimately didn't end up
       | going forwards. The staff were lovely, but it didn't feel like
       | _quite_ the same company I 'd visited in-person years ago to
       | collect my pre-paid card from. I guess that's something that
       | inevitably happens as companies scale up.
        
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