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

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?