This is why people love working for Elon Musk.
Anyone can raise problem with him & he will fix it directly.
Founder Mode
21–30 of 772 posts
Re: Founder Mode
#22We 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…
> 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.
Re: Founder Mode
#23I'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.
Re: Founder Mode
#24> 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.
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
Re: Founder Mode
#25I wonder how much bad advice for startups is out there. I don't think it is just about scaling a startup.
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…
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
Re: Founder Mode
#26> 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 th…
What are you quoting?
Re: Founder Mode
#27The 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 degr…
But wasnt Jobs fired and replaced by a Pepsi CEO because he was so toxic the company was running aground ?
Re: Founder Mode
#28I 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.
Re: Founder Mode
#29I 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.
Re: Founder Mode
#30I'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-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.)