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Though I think this article could be better, Kent is off in the right direction. Paul is unusually ambiguous about "founder mode" in his essay. Implicitly, he w

by jppope 2y ago

Though I think this article could be better, Kent is off in the right direction. Paul is unusually ambiguous about "founder mode" in his essay. Implicitly, he was saying that founders have a super power by not just letting good people do good work, that they (the founders) should involve themselves in decisions/discussions/work that professional managers should/could not. Many of us understand what he's going after, but he really didn't articulate it well. Kent basically makes that point in this essay by attempting to break it down and provide a more concrete foundation for the concept. My issue with both articles is that they are ignoring the curse of knowledge that these outlier founders have, and from that they are ruining their own paradigm... If you ask a top performing athlete how to be a top performing athlete its likely not going to be very useful advice if its directed at a novice. However in a conversation between those top performers there will be the nuance and the context to what they are trying to express that can make it true. I'm happy that Kent wrote this article, but I really think PG would benefit from revisiting his article to provide what he actually means to the rest of us.

deleted 2y ago
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hzay 2y ago
He meant that micromanaging and getting into details is good (not disparaging him here, fwiw I agree with him), but he didn't want to come right out and say it. Also, I think he's not yet sure what else it involves -- like the 100 ppl party thing. He just knows it's not delegation.
- gabesullice 2y ago
  > He meant that micromanaging and getting into details is good This isn't what I took away, but it may be that we're saying the same thing differently. My takeaway was that founders should 'trust, but verify'. And where they disagree/don't understand, they should question and pursue the truth of the matter rather than defer to experience.
gwd 2y ago
> I really think PG would benefit from revisiting his article to provide what he actually means to the rest of us. I read PG's article as explicitly saying, "I'm not going to talk about what Founder Mode is yet because nobody has any idea what it is. A whole bunch have us have only just realized that it's a thing, and it isn't X. Now that we know it exists, let's try to figure out what it is, rather than what it isn't." Most of the reactions I've seen so far seem to be implicitly assuming that if Founder Mode isn't X, it must be -X; that is, if it's not "Hire good people and let them do their jobs", then by logical necessity it must be "Hire mediocre people and run around micromanaging, countermanding orders, and generally undermining them." (Or maybe -0.5X, which is like X but more moderate: "Hire decent people and supervise them closely, occasionally countermanding orders.") I doubt very much that's at all what Paul, or any of the other people at the talk he mentioned, had in mind. It's a false dichotomy. The first step in breaking out of a false dichotomy is realizing that what you're facing isn't a dichotomy; the second step is figuring out what the other options are. Loads of people responding seem not to have made the first step yet. EDIT: The real goal of Founder Mode is probably to optimize for something completely different, which in some cases means deviating from the "Hire good people and let them do their jobs" guidance. But the point isn't to aim at deviation, the point is to aim at this other thing which might cause deviation. Micromanaging for no other reason than that you see other successful founders sometimes micromanage is just cargo culting.
- bluepizza 2y ago
  > Hire mediocre people and run around micromanaging, countermanding orders, and generally undermining them This is how most corporations operate. Tight budgets for headcount, cunning micromanagers, and emotional manipulation to try and get people to have less opinions and deliver more for a stale salary. Now these corporations are never going go get any sort of competitive advantage through innovation, but they get a huge amount of corporate and governmental contracts.
  - tbe-stream 2y ago
    This is an extremely negative view on what it takes to run a large scale organization.

by jppope 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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hzay 2y ago

He meant that micromanaging and getting into details is good (not disparaging him here, fwiw I agree with him), but he didn't want to come right out and say it. Also, I think he's not yet sure what else it involves -- like the 100 ppl party thing. He just knows it's not delegation.

gabesullice 2y ago
> He meant that micromanaging and getting into details is good This isn't what I took away, but it may be that we're saying the same thing differently. My takeaway was that founders should 'trust, but verify'. And where they disagree/don't understand, they should question and pursue the truth of the matter rather than defer to experience.

gwd 2y ago

> I really think PG would benefit from revisiting his article to provide what he actually means to the rest of us. I read PG's article as explicitly saying, "I'm not going to talk about what Founder Mode is yet because nobody has any idea what it is. A whole bunch have us have only just realized that it's a thing, and it isn't X. Now that we know it exists, let's try to figure out what it is, rather than what it isn't." Most of the reactions I've seen so far seem to be implicitly assuming that if Founder Mode isn't X, it must be -X; that is, if it's not "Hire good people and let them do their jobs", then by logical necessity it must be "Hire mediocre people and run around micromanaging, countermanding orders, and generally undermining them." (Or maybe -0.5X, which is like X but more moderate: "Hire decent people and supervise them closely, occasionally countermanding orders.") I doubt very much that's at all what Paul, or any of the other people at the talk he mentioned, had in mind. It's a false dichotomy. The first step in breaking out of a false dichotomy is realizing that what you're facing isn't a dichotomy; the second step is figuring out what the other options are. Loads of people responding seem not to have made the first step yet. EDIT: The real goal of Founder Mode is probably to optimize for something completely different, which in some cases means deviating from the "Hire good people and let them do their jobs" guidance. But the point isn't to aim at deviation, the point is to aim at this other thing which might cause deviation. Micromanaging for no other reason than that you see other successful founders sometimes micromanage is just cargo culting.

bluepizza 2y ago
> Hire mediocre people and run around micromanaging, countermanding orders, and generally undermining them This is how most corporations operate. Tight budgets for headcount, cunning micromanagers, and emotional manipulation to try and get people to have less opinions and deliver more for a stale salary. Now these corporations are never going go get any sort of competitive advantage through innovation, but they get a huge amount of corporate and governmental contracts.
- tbe-stream 2y ago
  This is an extremely negative view on what it takes to run a large scale organization.