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Founder Mode

• lollersk8r 2y ago
  [dead]
• jay-dee 2y ago
  Founder Mode has existed for a hundred years, probably more. Manager Mode evolved because of the inherent limitations of Founder Mode. PG really doesn't address the limitations of Founder Mode, because the appeal of Founder Mode is that it is possibly better than Manager Mode. As a multiple-time founder and also someone who post-founding has worked in the C-Suite from small to midsize companies, what I usually see are founders with narrow skillsets and little to no developmental pathway to improve beyond their core skills. Helicoptering is frequent and at times, very destructive because Founder Mode requires significant interpersonal skills the larger that organizations get. "Micromanaging" is often seen as "telling me how to do my job even if you have no idea how to do my job". And if your VC wants you to scale significantly, there really aren't a lot of good examples of Founder Mode doing that, but there are indeed a lot of examples of non Founder Mode doing it and a huge ecosystem/culture that supports it.
• namenotrequired 2y ago
  Is there a recording / transcript of Chesky’s talk or even a blog discussing its main points anywhere?
  • tomhoward 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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-approach https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-...
  • hagaetc 2y ago
    He talks about some of these things on Lennys podcast from a few months back here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ef0juAMqoE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ef0juAMqoE
• Oras 2y ago
  I wonder how much bad advice for startups is out there. I don't think it is just about scaling a startup.
  • PaulRobinson 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      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 https://youtu.be/JTpBFiW5PBo
• jerrygoyal 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    He’s also got 55 direct reports
  • henningpeters 2y ago
    Doesn’t match my experience
  • A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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
• svnt 2y ago
  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 naïveté 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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      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.
• gizmo 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
      • bboygravity 2y ago
        Let's not ignore the fact that you call GameStop a meme-stock. Please explain how it is a meme-stock in 2024 and what that even means? What's the definition? Like how is GameStop not a "real" stock or "real" company? It has 4 billion cash on hand (for 10B market cap company), no debt and is profitable. It had NONE of that before RC bought himself in. How is that a declining company? Or how does this fall under "not much seems to be changing"? Also "every positive thing that happened to the company, can be credited to the pumping of the stock" makes no sense at all. 3 of the 4 billion cash on hand was from stock offerings that happened this year. On 0 news. Every single spike in the past 3 years was on 0 news. You can keep blaming "pumping", that's fine. But you'll have to specify who's doing the pumping and why to make that statement have any meaning. It's unlikely that household investors are doing 100+ million volume A DAY in a company that issued around 300 million stocks total (referring to the 300%+ spike days this year on 0 news).
• ChaitanyaSai 2y ago
  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.
  • incognito124 2y ago
    What is a complex mind? Do you mean a brain? Also: > Ideas are always matched up with bottom-up data. That does not hold, I can have a myriad of ideas not grounded in reality
    • ChaitanyaSai 2y ago
      Complex minds, yes brains > Ideas are always matched up with bottom-up data. >>That does not hold, I can have a myriad of ideas not grounded in reality You are right. What I should clarify is that there is a process that always matches it up. You can have all those creative ideas, but you "know" at the same time that those are not real. You (except in some cases/pharmacologically altered) are not hallucinating like current LLMs (and some large orgs) do
• wqtz 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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-organiz-Mxq2z8FESpSzfpXeHyg4cw https://www.perplexity.ai/search/brian-chesky-interview-orga...
• jasode 2y ago
  >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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253
  • eevilspock 2y ago
• detourdog 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        I'm sort of a believer in that. Since it prioritizes being lucky.
    • detourdog 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    What are you quoting?
    • mkl 2y ago
      Seems like it's supposed to be a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41415637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41415637 by jasode, which is in turn quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253 by coffeemug in 2018.
  • sethammons 2y ago
    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.
• coahn 2y ago
  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?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • wiradikusuma 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
    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.
• _1tan 2y ago
  Is there a good resource on the management methods of Steve Jobs as indicated by the essay?
  • huhkerrf 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    But wasnt Jobs fired and replaced by a Pepsi CEO because he was so toxic the company was running aground ?
• richardburton 2y ago
  This is why people love working for Elon Musk. Anyone can raise problem with him & he will fix it directly.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • rl3 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • detourdog 2y ago
      I would think sarcasm is inappropriate in public discourse.
      • rl3 2y ago
        Ah, my mistake.
• bob1029 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
• philip1209 2y ago
  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 https://usefind.ai/jobs
• caseymarquis 2y ago
  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-Adizes-ebook/dp/B01MZGUKOC 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 2y ago
    I think the BS/quite good split for business books is more like 80/20 or maybe even 90/10.
• justmarc 2y ago
  I think there's just a fundamentally different level of "care" between founder, and manager. Just like that of a parent vs teacher.
  • gizmo 2y ago
    No that’s not it. Conventional managers are very ambitious and sincerely want their business to do great.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• lifeisstillgood 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Do you have any more information on the run-book concept?
  • M5x7wI3CmbEem10 2y ago
    I’m unable to keep up with book updates because both of the links on your profile are broken
  • puzanov 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• blueboo 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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
  • naveen99 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      chatgpt (or an equivalent) may also be able to write an email crafted to get to the top of that ranking.
      • naveen99 2y ago
        Well once ai agents become independent, and they start becoming full time employees, they should be allowed too…
    • dasil003 2y ago
      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.
• mitko 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Isn't Twitter doing much better now Musk has returned it to Founder mode?
• andrewstuart 2y ago
  Sounds like bad recruiting.
• elawler24 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Bring Back Steve Jobs!
• brainless 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    > 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.
  • 2y ago
• dartharva 2y ago
  Reminds me of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1eu574f/got_funding_met_on_yc_cofounder_matching_worst/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1eu574f/got_fu...
• amadeuspagel 2y ago
  "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 2y ago
    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
    • meiraleal 2y ago
      You become friends with pretty smart guys that have the potential to become superstars. Which superstar will join a wannabe startup?
    • JonChesterfield 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        > 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 :)
        • 2y ago
• heisenbit 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
• inSenCite 2y ago
  Nice conclusions but remarkably devoid of any useful advice
• Chance-Device 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Yeah but when your company gets a real challenge, you find out if you’re filled with builders or comp optimisers.
  • JonChesterfield 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • 2y ago
• _9hey 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  > 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/ 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Checks out from this old account of a BillG review: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
• breck 2y ago
  > "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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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/Module / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_design / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_analysis and "imperfect abstraction" problems (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction 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 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 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 https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch does a better job at extending the conversation than I ever could in an HN comment.
• prasoonds 2y ago
  Here’s an audio version if anyone prefers listening instead https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DLtJAShDN54ooPWpBspHPV98rh22gLGw/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DLtJAShDN54ooPWpBspHPV98rh2...
• ajb 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  This is conventional wisdom. https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-different https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-differ... https://hbr.org/2016/06/do-managers-and-leaders-really-do-different-things https://hbr.org/2016/06/do-managers-and-leaders-really-do-di... https://hbr.org/2022/09/the-best-managers-are-leaders-and-vice-versa 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 2y ago
    Synthesizing conventional wisdom into readable blog posts is Paul Graham's specialty though. It clearly has a market.
    • neom 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        what's the url? usually pg thinks lisp knowledge makes people more likely to succeed, not less
        • wahnfrieden 2y ago
• worstspotgain 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow elaborates at length on this, pulling in recent research and reevaluating old anthro and archaeological work
  • lifeisstillgood 2y ago
    Absolutely
  • tarcon 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• richrichie 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Gervais principle, like it or not,… has been pretty accurate IMO
  • alok-g 2y ago
    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-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  • frinxor 2y ago
    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=41214180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767151
• habosa 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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?"
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• nobunaga 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Manager mode sounds like magical thinking mode.
• fnord77 2y ago
  > Brian Chesky gave a talk anyone find this talk he's referring to?
  • euph0ria 2y ago
    Also looking for it..
• ivoras 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Musk is a good example of this. Amazing visionary; also extremely toxic.
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• skeeter2020 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    > 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".
• natosaichek 2y ago
  I feel like this article is reaching towards similar conclusions: https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/30/when-the-mismanagerial-class-destroys-great-companies/ 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
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  • nashadelic 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    Running at 20% optimization means certain death or at best zombification for startups that haven’t reached escape velocity so there’s that
  • regularfry 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3RV8nMzh8
• nightowl_games 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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”.
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• hoosieree 2y ago
  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/mail408.html#Iron https://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail4... [2]: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
• bearjaws 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  Do you have a link for the full talk?
  • zX41ZdbW 2y ago
    This? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product-growth-career/id1627920305?i=1000634526343 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product...
    • onursurme 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
  • gkiely 2y ago
    Some of his recent talks cover it: https://youtu.be/aZ-BjJZxNoA?si=yPYH71a76Mr1RWLr https://youtu.be/aZ-BjJZxNoA?si=yPYH71a76Mr1RWLr https://youtu.be/4ef0juAMqoE?si=fya1OCfUUR4n_gd1 https://youtu.be/4ef0juAMqoE?si=fya1OCfUUR4n_gd1
  • bjornsing 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
• marxisttemp 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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-innovation https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...
• tlogan 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        Have you looked at the stock price recently?
        • swalsh 2y ago
• asah 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
• giovannibonetti 2y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand
• cynicalpeace 2y ago
  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.
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• alberth 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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.
  • wetpaws 2y ago
    [dead]
• RivieraKid 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    is there any evidence it's more effective? PG offered one example, ABNB, which has had a lagging stock price since IPO.
• tschellenbach 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
• therepo90hn 2y ago
  God do I like the web style
• bjornsing 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• smugglerFlynn 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 2. Break the rules if the rules are stupid. This.
      • nathanappere 2y ago
        > Fix the rules if the rules are stupid" "Pay excellent people out of band, for example." why not fix the band ?
    • fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
      These are your personal essay points, not what was in the piece itself.
• narrator 2y ago
  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-jensen-huang-inside-nvidias-unique-organizational-culture/ https://www.apolloadvisor.com/unconventional-leadership-of-j... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around
  • joehandzik 2y ago
    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.
• tonetheman 2y ago
  [dead]
• urbandw311er 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  "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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Was really hoping this would be a new major mode for Emacs.
• philipwhiuk 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  George Hotz calls this "the button" on his last Lex podcast. <https://youtube.com/watch?v=dNrTrx42DGQ&t=5247 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 2y ago
  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.
• pphysch 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  "Thanks to...Elon Musk...for reading drafts of this." Good to know he's still held in high esteem by these people.
• malthaus 2y ago
  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
• bpm140 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
• deleted 2y ago
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• drewcoo 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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/ https://www.oreilly.com/radar/how-i-failed/ [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316 [2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-objective-c-and-contrasting-histories-2021-07-05 https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-object... [3] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/oxide-ditching-the-rules https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/oxide-ditching-the-rules
  • mells7 2y ago
    Unwarranted perspective from someone who is not a founder, but works with and has a lot of respect for them I think the common thread between the two blogs is context and detail are important. I kind of think “Founder mode” is just doing your own diligence on your decisions rather than trusting heuristics or outside third parties. The “HR lawyers” or the “professional managers” are probably not nearly as tied to the company as the founder, and therefore unwilling to wade into the details and rely on such heuristics or “playbooks” for decision making or advice giving. Tim does raise a salient point though in that finance functions are often overlooked or under invested, and siloed division. The whole company probably does not need to know the daily cash balance of the company, but team members should maybe think a bit more carefully about relative rates of return on their invested time or money, and “finance” is a good framework for doing just that. The best CFOs (or people more generally) look for that context (and help others do so too), so they can understand intuitively the impacts of potential decisions. Meanwhile, the professional managers run away from the detail and prefer to rely on playbooks and heuristics like the Conjoined Triangles of Success. I don’t think it always has to be that way though, you just need people to care enough to wade into the depths of detail and care as if they were a founder.
• drewcoo 2y ago
  This "Founder Mode" seems more like "Victim Mode" looking for someone to blame.
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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
• deleted 2y ago
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• alberth 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Reminds me of most small businesses.
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Is there a point to this article? It sounds like waffle.
• tompetry 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    if you can't hire good people, "founder mode" is not going to help you.
• bewaretheirs 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    "Bookish" I kinda like it
• jcims 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Cue to every founder writing tweets like “aCtuAlLy I waS In foUnDer mOdE tHe wHoLe TiMe” screenshots/links to new paul graham essay
  • bschmidt1 2y ago
    The micromanaging is about to get insane (it already is)
• daemonk 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > "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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
  • 1290cc 2y ago
    Literally what the CEO of Snowflake did, by posting a long corporate speak linkedin post everywhere on the web.
  • cwillu 2y ago
    "The tao that can be named is not the eternal tao"
    • borroka 2y ago
      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.
      • itishappy 2y ago
        Naming is the origin of all particular things, but the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The photon came after, for instance.
• kqr2 2y ago
  Is Brian Chesky's talk available online?
  • zX41ZdbW 2y ago
    Probably here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product-growth-career/id1627920305?i=1000634526343 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product...
    • kqr2 2y ago
      Isn't that podcast from last year whereas this talk was last week?
• bogdan-lab 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• tgtweak 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      "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.
• punnerud 2y ago
  I like the fact that Elon Musk read the draft… (credit at the end) Probably a great example of founder mode?
• bikamonki 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    What did they do that was so bad that it cost him 3 locations?
    • portn0y 2y ago
      Probably load up on financing to expand. Expansion floundered and they had to unload unprofitable and profitable locations to cover the debt.
      • itsoktocry 2y ago
        Why didn't he have the ability to foresee the idea was bad?
        • Invictus0 2y ago
          portnoy is not the op
    • Drunkfoowl 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      Am also wondering if part of the problem might have been timing. Did have 5 locations during the pandemic?
• sam345 2y ago
  Interview with Chesky. Talks about this around -57 https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-...
• lhh 2y ago
  Disappointed that Nigel Pennypinch is missing from the acknowledgements.
• Animats 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      > 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.
      • 2y ago
• richardw 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
  • crop_rotation 2y ago
    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-movie-maker https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...
  • twelve40 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  paul finally added https to his site. woohoo!!
• IAmGraydon 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    How to fire well?
    • IAmGraydon 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Link to Chesky speech? Video or transcript?
  • zX41ZdbW 2y ago
    Maybe this? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product-growth-career/id1627920305?i=1000634526343 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product...
• markerbrod 2y ago
  Does anyone know if the talk by Brian Chesk was recorded?
• baxtr 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        > On the flip side you can hire Michael Jordan and screw everything else up and still win Unless your company is a baseball team
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• GeorgeTirebiter 2y ago
  "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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
• pedalpete 2y ago
  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.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• silverlake 2y ago
  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.
• goatmanbah 2y ago
  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?
• ineedaj0b 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
• ripped_britches 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Does your SJ example work? pg is talking about scaling your startup after initial success
    • diegof79 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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=8sSeDIGvOhkrF99aMHKoFg https://x.com/paulg/status/1830300111232188626?s=46&t=8sSeDI...
• JakeSc 2y ago
  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™ or are you a Founder™?" 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  Innovation needs an owner. Repeat work needs a manager. Its that simple.
• baby 2y ago
  [flagged]
• ynniv 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    agree
• bankcust08385 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Where can we read it?
• cm11 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 :-)
• swiftcoder 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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"
      • 2y ago
• swisniewski 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    "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 2y ago
    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.
    • yodon 2y ago
      Tom Peters picked up the concept after it was invented by the founders of Hewlett-Packard
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  "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-the-airbnb-backlash-has-begun-as-the-company-becomes-part-of-the-mob/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevj77rdp89o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevj77rdp89o https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article291610590.html https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article291610590.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vrbo-nick-saban-ad-trolling-210147460.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vrbo-nick-saban-ad-trolling-2... https://www.kake.com/home/city-of-wichita-looking-to-add-laws-to-make-airbnb-vrbo-renters-liable-for-nuisance/article_051fa9c6-674a-11ef-853d-07316b3d607a.html https://www.kake.com/home/city-of-wichita-looking-to-add-law... https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2024/08/26/man-shot-killed-outside-airbnb-pool-party-in-ne-houston/ https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2024/08/26/man-shot... https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/crime/2024/08/26/497715/fatal-shooting-houston-airbnb-pool-party-one-dead/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/crime/2024/... https://globalnews.ca/news/10723835/airbnb-hidden-camera-santa-monica/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10723835/airbnb-hidden-camera-san... https://www.businessinsider.com/restoration-train-car-airbnb-profitable-idaho-2024-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/restoration-train-car-airbnb... https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/love-humor/airbnb-mountain-town-concerns/ https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/love-humor/airbnb-moun... https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/jail-sentence-sought-for-london-airbnb-host-convicted-of-voyeurism https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/jail-sentence-sought-for... https://www.wxxv25.com/four-arrested-after-shooting-at-gulfport-airbnb/ https://www.wxxv25.com/four-arrested-after-shooting-at-gulfp... https://nypost.com/2024/08/20/lifestyle/i-stayed-in-a-1-a-night-airbnb-you-wont-believe-what-i-got/ https://nypost.com/2024/08/20/lifestyle/i-stayed-in-a-1-a-ni... https://buffalonews.com/news/local/business/gov-kathy-hochul-airbnb-registry-fees-housing-crisis/article_ea465be2-664d-11ef-802d-57298b17a202.html https://buffalonews.com/news/local/business/gov-kathy-hochul... https://www.summitdaily.com/opinion/letter-to-the-editor-frisco-doesnt-have-adequate-control-over-short-term-rentals/ 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Strawman comment
    • taurath 2y ago
      Its a series of strawmen that make up the blog I'm replying to - no counterforce was given to the benefits of "founder mode" so I'm making those arguments.
• peter_vukovic 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  https://chatgpt.com/share/0ec0fcf8-c284-4f50-a452-04ca94911a14 https://chatgpt.com/share/0ec0fcf8-c284-4f50-a452-04ca94911a...
• jgalt212 2y ago
  Has anyone broken more laws in more jurisdictions that Brian Chesky?
• Nevermark 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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.
• jschveibinz 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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_ 2y ago
    Yes. But we can absolutely in if they are being run badly
• NeutralCrane 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Sounds like Admiral Rickover's management principles. [0] [0] https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm
• calmbonsai 2y ago
  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.
• mandeepj 2y ago
  Founders are also inventors, learners, and path breakers. So, as a founder you understand your business and engineering behind it; that's why you can pull it back - more often than not - when things go bad. I don't think a professional manager would have given a new lease of life to Apple with iMac, iPod and iPhone. Zappos had a similar story regarding Pivot.
• tqi 2y ago
  I don't think there's such thing as a founder "mode", just good founders and shit founders, and anyone who thinks they can turn it on and off is definitely a shit founder.
• Lanzaa 2y ago
  I think founder mode is related to the Theory of Constraints[0]. When a founder is already successfully growing a company, they have experienced pushing past many different constraints/bottlenecks of their company. Usually this includes some understanding of the constraints of their industry or they wouldn't have founded a company. Most manager mode advice will be irrelevant to the current company constraint, but can take resources away from solving that constraint. The founder can draw on the knowledge of past constraints and focus on what is important for the company. For all his problems, my example of this would be Elon Musk and SpaceX. He learned about the space industry and identified the constraint keeping the space industry down. Every launch provider was trying to maximize the performance of their rockets. To maximize performance each rocket was basically a bespoke work of art, this made rockets expensive, which lead to high costs, which reduced the number of customers. Musk chose to make a rocket that did NOT maximize performance, instead focused on reducing the cost of each launch. The most expensive part of a rocket are the engines, so SpaceX focused on making Merlin engines at low cost. Rockets are expensive, why are they thrown away? To maximize performance. Since SpaceX had already abandoned maximizing performance at all costs, the opportunity to reuse rockets became clear. Use leftover fuel margin to attempt to land and reuse the rockets. Once Musk believed SpaceX's reuse was going to work. He moved onto a new major constraint, customers. SpaceX did not and does not have enough customers for the launch volume they are able to support. They looked at the opportunities and decided that a large constellation of satellites providing fast internet access in LEO would be profitable if launches were now cheaper. So SpaceX created Starlink to take up launch volume. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints
• denisvlr 2y ago
  This sounds related to Steve Jobs' concept of "content vs process": https://medium.com/@1kg/the-untold-secrets-behind-steve-jobs-tech-revolution-content-over-process-6adaa35efba3 https://medium.com/@1kg/the-untold-secrets-behind-steve-jobs... Founders are "content" oriented, managers are "process" oriented.
• pontifier 2y ago
  If I had to articulate why I feel the need to do certain things my way, against all advice by people who think they know a better way, I'd boil it down like this: There are things that I see as important to the core idea of the company that nobody else understands. If they did, they'd have seen the need for the company and done it themselves. Its more than just a vision. It's like a hologram. Anyone can see the image, but the founders see the fringe pattern. I see why all the hidden elements need to be just so or the whole thing is meaningless. Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but it's rare to find someone that truly gets things rather than just going through the motions. If you do, its likely they have their own idea. It feels like every decision I make gets resistance from people who live their lives in mediocrity. If they really knew the best course of action they'd be the one in charge and I'd be the one trying to give the mediocre advice. I'm so tired, but nobody else is going to do it right.
• bobosha 2y ago
  In my experience, "founder mode" is when founders intuitively understand what is best for their business and steer clear of cargo cult practices. All too often, professional management falls back on formulaic methods that end up driving businesses into the ground. This post [1] is a great case study of one such instance. [1] https://healthio.notion.site/How-Cargo-Cult-Thinking-Nearly-Derailed-Our-Startup-aef367f7acc94b26a8bb4c73684958e6 https://healthio.notion.site/How-Cargo-Cult-Thinking-Nearly-...