Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 772 posts

Re: Founder Mode

#11

Post by ChaitanyaSai »

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.

Re: Founder Mode

#12

Post by henningpeters »

jerrygoyal wrote: post #6

> 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.

Doesn’t match my experience

Re: Founder Mode

#13

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

jerrygoyal wrote: post #6

> 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.

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.

Re: Founder Mode

#14

Post by wqtz »

> 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.

Re: Founder Mode

#15

Post by jasode »

>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

Re: Founder Mode

#16

Post by detourdog »

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.

Re: Founder Mode

#17

Post by tkiolp4 »

> 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.

Re: Founder Mode

#18

Post by coahn »

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?

Re: Founder Mode

#20

Post by rl3 »

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.

Post reply on HN