7 ms·

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." E

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organizations are structured the way they typically are, he wouldn't have experimented with so many poor (and ultimately failed) governance structures. It seems like he was looking at his organization through a social lens (democracy, everyone should have a say) from a governance perspective but having it focused through a product lens (the app). That just doesn't mesh well. Social organizations typically have social missions, not products. When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla). He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained.

rPlayer6554 9mo ago
Could you recommend any book in particular?
- WoodenChair 9mo ago
  One that would've helped is "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" which is a collection of interviews with startup founders by Jessica Livingston. Even though this was a non-profit it effectively sounds like it was a tech startup (he was building an app that was based on, at the time (late 2000s), cutting edge machine learning technology). I think by hearing other founders' stories building other tech products, he would've learned about how they structured their organizations and led their teams. I liked the book personally, but the interviews will be hit or miss depending on the participant. Here's the book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3N47TG3 https://amzn.to/3N47TG3 Here's a podcast summary of it: https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/1127af729a0d4aec/founders-at-work https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/1127af729a0d4aec/foun... But frankly even just a basic textbook or video course on leadership/management would've helped or something like High Output Management by Andy Grove (Amazon https://amzn.to/3NCAZME https://amzn.to/3NCAZME, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/095f226633d34496/high-output-management https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/095f226633d34496/high...). In terms of dealing with all of the personal conflict between team members, Radical Candor may have helped (Amazon https://amzn.to/4qNa7bf https://amzn.to/4qNa7bf, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/938d044a/radical-candor https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/938d044a/radical-cand...).
  - 0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
    SV tech startups are an incredibly niche form of business, nobody should base their thinking on general management around them alone. They function within an ecosystem designed for them, like plants that only grow in a rainforest. Most management books that most people recommend are not based on scientific evidence, studies, academic literature, etc. They're mostly memes; relatively recent books written by some kind of famous person, benefiting from the heuristics that make people favor the famous, successful, or high status [regardless of the fact that their lessons are usually from one source, type of company, culture, etc]. Compare that to practical management books based on evidence and studies; they're boring and old, or simply not catchy or sexy, so nobody recommends them. There's also books that some people know about, and have a good track record, yet nobody follows. Deming's books should be mandatory reading for anyone in management, and anyone who cites Toyota as a model should absolutely have read them. But good luck finding anyone who actually follows the advice (same for Ackoff, Goldratt, Senge, Jacques, etc). Likely they are just too complicated and most people are not smart enough to manage this way.
  - pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
    Why not a book about making co-operatives work, or managing direction in non-hierarchical orgs, management structure in public interest companies/charities, or establishing scientific organisations? It sounds like he learnt lessons about the need for inclusion of users, need for strong information flow, what doesn't work (from his perspective) in hierarchy.
    - justincormack 9mo ago
      I read Maverick by Ricardo Semmler a long time ago and loved it about non hierarchy in business. Must re read it
patcon 9mo ago
I agree that I can see plainly that he wasn't interested in certain ways of running the organization, but also... Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures -- we certainly don't condemn the very idea of hierarchy or capitalism. But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me
- WoodenChair 9mo ago
  First, I'll just say I think the iNaturalist app is great and I've used it before and enjoyed it. I assume he had good intentions when experimenting with non-hierarchical governance, but this wasn't the right organization with which to experiment with them. If it was feeding the poor, maybe "sociocracy" makes sense. But its main goal was to make an app (and although it's a non-profit it maintains a proprietary machine learning model mind you, this isn't Wikipedia). And when you make an app you need direction. You can't be going in 5 different major directions based on individual contributors' whims. And beyond even just the structural issues, he also needed basic leadership/management skills to direct the product which he didn't provide. "Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative." So he was a director who didn't direct. Then later on when he chose to step down from being a leader, he decided he wanted to direct again. Isn't that ironic? As far as can we criticize? Of course we can. If someone's going to write a public essay calling out other people by name and criticizing them we can criticize their essay and what they wrote about their experience.
  - patcon 9mo ago
    thanks for reading my message in good faith :) as someone who co-founded a non-hierarchical community[1] (that's still going strong after a decade of weekly events), co-founded a worker cooperative[2], and experimented with sociocracy (and ALSO fully admit I failed out of it for reasons of misalignment!) -- i just think we owe it to ourselves to not discount that certain things XY can't be built under system Z. There are many ways possible where leaders don't always direct, or maybe only direct in short spurts. This all-or-nothing, lead-from-the-front, only-way-through-is-up perspective of getting things done (and working together), it's not the only way possible :) (respectfully!) [1]: https://civictech.ca/ https://civictech.ca/ [2]: https://hypha.coop/ https://hypha.coop/
DwnVoteHoneyPot 9mo ago
He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help.
- teiferer 9mo ago
  And ironically, after going on and on about all the details of those failures, he asks the reader for a job. Does he really think that this overly long text is a good ad for getting people to hire him? As a potential employer, I already see in front of me the public ranting about what is wrong with my organisation if (or when) he eventually leaves again. Dodged a bullet right there.
- EZ-E 9mo ago
  This was my thought too. The author seems very passionate, but I imagine he could be hard to work with.
- lelanthran 9mo ago
  > He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help. This isn't a personality problem; it's far far worse (or better, depending on your point of view) than that: FTFA > We hired two new staff to work on it, and did our best to reconcile what little guidance we got from Leadership with an internal process focused on discussion and consent. By late 2024, the app wasn’t what anyone wanted it to be, Yup, no surprises there. > Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, > how much to disclose in our negotiations with CAS (IMO everything) or whether board members should be required to donate money (IMO no, plutocracy is bad at all times and at all levels) > I tried to do what seemed like the only thing I could do in a hierarchy > Accepting a grant without any consultation with staff about how its obligations might be met ... > Since the exodus, Leadership has improved on some fronts [...] They hired three new engineers for the mobile team that seem both experienced and enthusiastic. Well, a large grant will let you do that :-/ It seems to me that the problem was not one of personality, but of ideology. Personality is deeply embedded in humans, ideology is merely adopted. Author's ideology differed from that of leadership. His personality is probably irrelevant.
Eji1700 9mo ago
It bothers me that pragmatism and understanding things like business, economics, and the like can often be commingled with being greedy or evil. Yes there are lots of people who use what they learn to justify shit positions but personally I started learning all these things because in any other endeavor you want to take seriously you learn everything you can about it. The number of people who mean well but then just try to hope their way through stuff and relearn the same basic principles is sadly much too high. Hell it doesn’t even have to revolve around moral/societal principles. The number of games I’ve seen that could’ve done better if they understood marketing, business, or even basic competitive balance better (even if so you can make your party game more fun) is huge. But then again we’ve got this generation speed running “why finance laws and institutions exist” thanks to crypto. I guess the silver lining is people do learn a lot more once they’ve had personal experience with it.
- GrowingSideways 9mo ago
  [flagged]
- cyberrock 9mo ago
  I used to roll my eyes at fictional settings like LotR and Starcraft (Protoss) that pit orthodox/"white" magic versus forbidden/"black" magic, but now I've woken up to see this industry split into such a moral schism in multiple ways. (Aside, of course, from white/gray/black hat hackers, which is more about actions rather than knowledge)
- geocar 9mo ago
  If you meet someone who understand business, it's going to color your opinion of other people who meet who seem to understand business, until you either learn business or die. That's how all prejudices work: We're wired up to be afraid and anxious and to share (and communicate) our anxieties to our friends and neighbours. We're trying to help. The thing is, knowledge; business, economics, and so on, probably can be used to help people, but in a lot of peoples' recent memories, it's being used to harm. I lost a lot of my teen friends when I "went corporate", but thirty years later I'm reconnecting with some of them, because people change, and we can learn to recognise someone will participate in capitalism for lots of reasons that are not so simple as being "greedy" or "evil". But to me, I think it is simple: Capitalism is almost certainly unavoidable, so the world could be better if more kind people participate well in it than don't!
doctorpangloss 9mo ago
> When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla). you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others
- WoodenChair 9mo ago
  > you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world. - The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers - It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monopoly-breakup-could-mean-the-death-of-firefox.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop... - Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox-in-peril-while-mozilla-rewards-ceo.html#:~:text=Despite%20the%20small%20drop%20in,rewarded%20for%20success%20not%20failure. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox... - Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-2021-fs-final-1010.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202... - It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.) I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."
  - auggierose 9mo ago
    Just out of interest, how much should the guaranteed salary of a non-profit CEO maximally be?
mmooss 9mo ago
That's one view of how to structure organizations but hardly the only one. Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well. Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of automotive manufacturing. My impression is that recent embrace of hierarchy and authority, and rejection of democracy and equality, are tied to a sharp rise in such ideas in politics. It's hard to believe it's coincidence. And, also maybe not coincidentally, it's inherently conservative to say, 'this is the way it's always been and must be'. Innovation is a powerful force. The management ideas the parent embraces were once innovations, which met the same response the parent gives to newer innovators.
- Earw0rm 9mo ago
  Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread: Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power. At their best, flat hierarchies do as described. At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist. Humans are complicated, and we do seem to have a certain amount of low-level social wiring for hierarchy and pecking order, even if it's far from absolute. I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so; large amounts of energy are expended either attempting to belong to that few, or currying favour with them. Power tends to accrue to those most inclined to seize it. Whereas in a more formal org, people with "manager" in their title are at least subject to a minimum amount of vetting, training and oversight. TLDR, flat hierarchy can be better than rigid hierarchy, but nominally "flat" hierarchy with power-gradient characteristics can be the worst of both worlds.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
GrowingSideways 9mo ago
> Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, If they had something to contribute they would have figured a label to slap on
dr_dshiv 9mo ago
Do share book recommendations, please.
- WoodenChair 9mo ago
  See the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550083
hibikir 9mo ago
IMO, the difficulty with your typical business book is practical application: I've spent way too much time over my career trying to explain to leadership at different levels how they were acting in ways opposite to the very books they had on their desks. In one very high profile case, even the book they wrote! Leadership comes down to Feynman's first principle: You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
isaacfrond 9mo ago
What's your recommendation for 'some basic business books'?
Sharlin 9mo ago
The iNaturalist app is incidental, merely a means to an end – an end that's fundamentally social in nature. Like Wikipedia. The software merely enables the mission. This is his (very valid) viewpoint, I believe.
thaumasiotes 9mo ago
> Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. Do you have any recommendations for business books about effective management / leadership?
jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago
> He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained. This stuck out to me too. There's nothing more frustrating for the actual leadership than someone with soft power who says they don't want to lead trying to come in and obstruct every decision. As an armchair quarterback I feel like if he had kept his tinder dry he probably could have gotten some of what he wanted? He could have advocated to head up the casual spin-off app as a small team. Giving a founder who wants to step out of leadership a pet project is a very common way to handle this situation. Instead it sounds like he got caught up picking fights on every decision and wasted his credibility. Talking to leadership is a skill and part of that skill is packaging things concisely and effectively. Even if the leadership used to be your confounders.
duxup 9mo ago
My anecdotal experience with folks who gravitate towards ideas about unstructured organizations (of any kind) ... also very much expect the output of that organization will just naturally be what they want. I sometimes wonder how their personal mental human simulator works in those cases as to me it is obvious that such an org will (among a lot of other things) not necessarily output what I want or even be predictable. That's not a knock on the author, I appreciate the article.
- miningape 9mo ago
  > My anecdotal experience with folks who gravitate towards ideas about unstructured organizations (of any kind) ... also very much expect the output of that organization will just naturally be what they want Got that exact impression from this article. No doubt the leadership has issues, but I also get the feeling he wouldn't have been happy with this direction even if a group elected it - although, to his credit, it sounds like he probably would've stuck with it longer. Also not knocking the author, I hope he finds something more fulfilling to work on - and he's probably awesome to work with.
Aurornis 9mo ago
> He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. I've gone back and forth between IC and management. Giving up the influence of being in management can be hard. If you don't agree with management's direction, it's even harder. Hiring former managers into IC positions can be risky for this reason. A lot of former managers who switch to IC roles are amazing because they understand the management perspective and they're happy to be able to do their job without the responsibility and accountability (and meetings!) of a management role. The risk is that you get someone who desires all of the control of being in management without the responsibility and accountability. When someone gives up management responsibilities and obligations but still wants to drive the organization, like the vibes I'm getting from this post, it's not going to end well.

rPlayer6554 9mo ago

Could you recommend any book in particular?

WoodenChair 9mo ago
One that would've helped is "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" which is a collection of interviews with startup founders by Jessica Livingston. Even though this was a non-profit it effectively sounds like it was a tech startup (he was building an app that was based on, at the time (late 2000s), cutting edge machine learning technology). I think by hearing other founders' stories building other tech products, he would've learned about how they structured their organizations and led their teams. I liked the book personally, but the interviews will be hit or miss depending on the participant. Here's the book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3N47TG3 https://amzn.to/3N47TG3 Here's a podcast summary of it: https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/1127af729a0d4aec/founders-at-work https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/1127af729a0d4aec/foun... But frankly even just a basic textbook or video course on leadership/management would've helped or something like High Output Management by Andy Grove (Amazon https://amzn.to/3NCAZME https://amzn.to/3NCAZME, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/095f226633d34496/high-output-management https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/095f226633d34496/high...). In terms of dealing with all of the personal conflict between team members, Radical Candor may have helped (Amazon https://amzn.to/4qNa7bf https://amzn.to/4qNa7bf, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/938d044a/radical-candor https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/938d044a/radical-cand...).
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
  SV tech startups are an incredibly niche form of business, nobody should base their thinking on general management around them alone. They function within an ecosystem designed for them, like plants that only grow in a rainforest. Most management books that most people recommend are not based on scientific evidence, studies, academic literature, etc. They're mostly memes; relatively recent books written by some kind of famous person, benefiting from the heuristics that make people favor the famous, successful, or high status [regardless of the fact that their lessons are usually from one source, type of company, culture, etc]. Compare that to practical management books based on evidence and studies; they're boring and old, or simply not catchy or sexy, so nobody recommends them. There's also books that some people know about, and have a good track record, yet nobody follows. Deming's books should be mandatory reading for anyone in management, and anyone who cites Toyota as a model should absolutely have read them. But good luck finding anyone who actually follows the advice (same for Ackoff, Goldratt, Senge, Jacques, etc). Likely they are just too complicated and most people are not smart enough to manage this way.
- pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
  Why not a book about making co-operatives work, or managing direction in non-hierarchical orgs, management structure in public interest companies/charities, or establishing scientific organisations? It sounds like he learnt lessons about the need for inclusion of users, need for strong information flow, what doesn't work (from his perspective) in hierarchy.
  - justincormack 9mo ago
    I read Maverick by Ricardo Semmler a long time ago and loved it about non hierarchy in business. Must re read it

patcon 9mo ago

I agree that I can see plainly that he wasn't interested in certain ways of running the organization, but also... Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures -- we certainly don't condemn the very idea of hierarchy or capitalism. But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me

WoodenChair 9mo ago
First, I'll just say I think the iNaturalist app is great and I've used it before and enjoyed it. I assume he had good intentions when experimenting with non-hierarchical governance, but this wasn't the right organization with which to experiment with them. If it was feeding the poor, maybe "sociocracy" makes sense. But its main goal was to make an app (and although it's a non-profit it maintains a proprietary machine learning model mind you, this isn't Wikipedia). And when you make an app you need direction. You can't be going in 5 different major directions based on individual contributors' whims. And beyond even just the structural issues, he also needed basic leadership/management skills to direct the product which he didn't provide. "Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative." So he was a director who didn't direct. Then later on when he chose to step down from being a leader, he decided he wanted to direct again. Isn't that ironic? As far as can we criticize? Of course we can. If someone's going to write a public essay calling out other people by name and criticizing them we can criticize their essay and what they wrote about their experience.
- patcon 9mo ago
  thanks for reading my message in good faith :) as someone who co-founded a non-hierarchical community[1] (that's still going strong after a decade of weekly events), co-founded a worker cooperative[2], and experimented with sociocracy (and ALSO fully admit I failed out of it for reasons of misalignment!) -- i just think we owe it to ourselves to not discount that certain things XY can't be built under system Z. There are many ways possible where leaders don't always direct, or maybe only direct in short spurts. This all-or-nothing, lead-from-the-front, only-way-through-is-up perspective of getting things done (and working together), it's not the only way possible :) (respectfully!) [1]: https://civictech.ca/ https://civictech.ca/ [2]: https://hypha.coop/ https://hypha.coop/

DwnVoteHoneyPot 9mo ago

He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help.

teiferer 9mo ago
And ironically, after going on and on about all the details of those failures, he asks the reader for a job. Does he really think that this overly long text is a good ad for getting people to hire him? As a potential employer, I already see in front of me the public ranting about what is wrong with my organisation if (or when) he eventually leaves again. Dodged a bullet right there.
EZ-E 9mo ago
This was my thought too. The author seems very passionate, but I imagine he could be hard to work with.
lelanthran 9mo ago
> He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help. This isn't a personality problem; it's far far worse (or better, depending on your point of view) than that: FTFA > We hired two new staff to work on it, and did our best to reconcile what little guidance we got from Leadership with an internal process focused on discussion and consent. By late 2024, the app wasn’t what anyone wanted it to be, Yup, no surprises there. > Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, > how much to disclose in our negotiations with CAS (IMO everything) or whether board members should be required to donate money (IMO no, plutocracy is bad at all times and at all levels) > I tried to do what seemed like the only thing I could do in a hierarchy > Accepting a grant without any consultation with staff about how its obligations might be met ... > Since the exodus, Leadership has improved on some fronts [...] They hired three new engineers for the mobile team that seem both experienced and enthusiastic. Well, a large grant will let you do that :-/ It seems to me that the problem was not one of personality, but of ideology. Personality is deeply embedded in humans, ideology is merely adopted. Author's ideology differed from that of leadership. His personality is probably irrelevant.

Eji1700 9mo ago

It bothers me that pragmatism and understanding things like business, economics, and the like can often be commingled with being greedy or evil. Yes there are lots of people who use what they learn to justify shit positions but personally I started learning all these things because in any other endeavor you want to take seriously you learn everything you can about it. The number of people who mean well but then just try to hope their way through stuff and relearn the same basic principles is sadly much too high. Hell it doesn’t even have to revolve around moral/societal principles. The number of games I’ve seen that could’ve done better if they understood marketing, business, or even basic competitive balance better (even if so you can make your party game more fun) is huge. But then again we’ve got this generation speed running “why finance laws and institutions exist” thanks to crypto. I guess the silver lining is people do learn a lot more once they’ve had personal experience with it.

GrowingSideways 9mo ago
[flagged]
cyberrock 9mo ago
I used to roll my eyes at fictional settings like LotR and Starcraft (Protoss) that pit orthodox/"white" magic versus forbidden/"black" magic, but now I've woken up to see this industry split into such a moral schism in multiple ways. (Aside, of course, from white/gray/black hat hackers, which is more about actions rather than knowledge)
geocar 9mo ago
If you meet someone who understand business, it's going to color your opinion of other people who meet who seem to understand business, until you either learn business or die. That's how all prejudices work: We're wired up to be afraid and anxious and to share (and communicate) our anxieties to our friends and neighbours. We're trying to help. The thing is, knowledge; business, economics, and so on, probably can be used to help people, but in a lot of peoples' recent memories, it's being used to harm. I lost a lot of my teen friends when I "went corporate", but thirty years later I'm reconnecting with some of them, because people change, and we can learn to recognise someone will participate in capitalism for lots of reasons that are not so simple as being "greedy" or "evil". But to me, I think it is simple: Capitalism is almost certainly unavoidable, so the world could be better if more kind people participate well in it than don't!

doctorpangloss 9mo ago

> When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla). you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

WoodenChair 9mo ago
> you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world. - The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers - It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monopoly-breakup-could-mean-the-death-of-firefox.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop... - Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox-in-peril-while-mozilla-rewards-ceo.html#:~:text=Despite%20the%20small%20drop%20in,rewarded%20for%20success%20not%20failure. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox... - Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-2021-fs-final-1010.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202... - It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.) I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."
- auggierose 9mo ago
  Just out of interest, how much should the guaranteed salary of a non-profit CEO maximally be?

mmooss 9mo ago

That's one view of how to structure organizations but hardly the only one. Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well. Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of automotive manufacturing. My impression is that recent embrace of hierarchy and authority, and rejection of democracy and equality, are tied to a sharp rise in such ideas in politics. It's hard to believe it's coincidence. And, also maybe not coincidentally, it's inherently conservative to say, 'this is the way it's always been and must be'. Innovation is a powerful force. The management ideas the parent embraces were once innovations, which met the same response the parent gives to newer innovators.

Earw0rm 9mo ago
Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread: Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power. At their best, flat hierarchies do as described. At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist. Humans are complicated, and we do seem to have a certain amount of low-level social wiring for hierarchy and pecking order, even if it's far from absolute. I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so; large amounts of energy are expended either attempting to belong to that few, or currying favour with them. Power tends to accrue to those most inclined to seize it. Whereas in a more formal org, people with "manager" in their title are at least subject to a minimum amount of vetting, training and oversight. TLDR, flat hierarchy can be better than rigid hierarchy, but nominally "flat" hierarchy with power-gradient characteristics can be the worst of both worlds.
- deleted 9mo ago
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GrowingSideways 9mo ago

> Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, If they had something to contribute they would have figured a label to slap on

dr_dshiv 9mo ago

Do share book recommendations, please.

WoodenChair 9mo ago
See the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550083

hibikir 9mo ago

IMO, the difficulty with your typical business book is practical application: I've spent way too much time over my career trying to explain to leadership at different levels how they were acting in ways opposite to the very books they had on their desks. In one very high profile case, even the book they wrote! Leadership comes down to Feynman's first principle: You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

isaacfrond 9mo ago

What's your recommendation for 'some basic business books'?

Sharlin 9mo ago

The iNaturalist app is incidental, merely a means to an end – an end that's fundamentally social in nature. Like Wikipedia. The software merely enables the mission. This is his (very valid) viewpoint, I believe.

thaumasiotes 9mo ago

> Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. Do you have any recommendations for business books about effective management / leadership?

jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago

> He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained. This stuck out to me too. There's nothing more frustrating for the actual leadership than someone with soft power who says they don't want to lead trying to come in and obstruct every decision. As an armchair quarterback I feel like if he had kept his tinder dry he probably could have gotten some of what he wanted? He could have advocated to head up the casual spin-off app as a small team. Giving a founder who wants to step out of leadership a pet project is a very common way to handle this situation. Instead it sounds like he got caught up picking fights on every decision and wasted his credibility. Talking to leadership is a skill and part of that skill is packaging things concisely and effectively. Even if the leadership used to be your confounders.

duxup 9mo ago

My anecdotal experience with folks who gravitate towards ideas about unstructured organizations (of any kind) ... also very much expect the output of that organization will just naturally be what they want. I sometimes wonder how their personal mental human simulator works in those cases as to me it is obvious that such an org will (among a lot of other things) not necessarily output what I want or even be predictable. That's not a knock on the author, I appreciate the article.

miningape 9mo ago
> My anecdotal experience with folks who gravitate towards ideas about unstructured organizations (of any kind) ... also very much expect the output of that organization will just naturally be what they want Got that exact impression from this article. No doubt the leadership has issues, but I also get the feeling he wouldn't have been happy with this direction even if a group elected it - although, to his credit, it sounds like he probably would've stuck with it longer. Also not knocking the author, I hope he finds something more fulfilling to work on - and he's probably awesome to work with.

Aurornis 9mo ago

> He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. I've gone back and forth between IC and management. Giving up the influence of being in management can be hard. If you don't agree with management's direction, it's even harder. Hiring former managers into IC positions can be risky for this reason. A lot of former managers who switch to IC roles are amazing because they understand the management perspective and they're happy to be able to do their job without the responsibility and accountability (and meetings!) of a management role. The risk is that you get someone who desires all of the control of being in management without the responsibility and accountability. When someone gives up management responsibilities and obligations but still wants to drive the organization, like the vibes I'm getting from this post, it's not going to end well.