This is why people love working for Elon Musk. Anyone can raise problem with him & he will fix it directly.
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Founder Mode
31–40 of 772 posts
Re: Founder Mode
#32The 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…
I think because you can't give C-level/(senior) manager candidates whiteboard interviews. The answers are all "it depends" and also depend on how the person explains it. Not to mention tech founders are usually technical people who are not used to bullshitters.
Your concern is valid, but since the company is their "baby", they care more than those for-hire professionals who can go to greener pastures.
Re: Founder Mode
#33The big thing missing from pg’s essay is how the professional managerial class has this big filter where only those who are willing to jump through hoops for 20 years get to the c-suite. In businesses of any size it’s just not possible to get promoted straight up the ranks in your 20s no matter how good you are. Seniority trumps ability. Founders are excluded from this filter process and to nobody’s surprise founders…
It does (rarely) happen though. Example: how Ryan Cohen (self-made billionaire founder of Chewy) got himself into a different established company. He bought enough shares for himself, took over the board of an established company and put in some of his own, replaced the shitty CEO (by himself) and turned an established declining company around to profitability and possibly long-term growth.
Re: Founder Mode
#34I 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 founde…
Isn’t the point of founder mode that it doesn’t scale? It’s the wrong mode in all cases except the one where the founder is still in charge. It doesn’t scale, but it doesn’t need to.
Re: Founder Mode
#35I think there's just a fundamentally different level of "care" between founder, and manager. Just like that of a parent vs teacher.
Re: Founder Mode
#36[deleted]
Re: Founder Mode
#37> 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…
I've worked with two amazing VPs of eng, one of which unified our ops and dev teams in purpose and goals, and the other was able to re-focus us from firefighting to sustainable growth in engineering projects. They were worth, literally, their weight in gold to the success of the company. These happened at a hundred person eng dept and a 300 person eng org if I recall.
I have also worked with a couple who I am not sure what they did. And a couple that I think were actively harmful by not taking actions, letting problems steep, and pursuing pie in the sky solutions ("we could expand from our core product to offer our $internl_tool_that_barely_works, let's overly fund that while customers churn on quality issues")
And fwiw, I have yet to have a positive experience from an ex-googler and it is more of a toss up with former amazon folks. They are simply too used to white glove systems that have had, literally, billions spent developing these systems to the custom problems of these mega orgs.
Re: Founder Mode
#38The big thing missing from pg’s essay is how the professional managerial class has this big filter where only those who are willing to jump through hoops for 20 years get to the c-suite. In businesses of any size it’s just not possible to get promoted straight up the ranks in your 20s no matter how good you are. Seniority trumps ability. Founders are excluded from this filter process and to nobody’s surprise founders…
> filters out the most capable and most effective people from executive positions
Well, yes, because generally somebody who is actually 'the most capable and most effective' will simply be running their own business, why would they waste time climbing the ranks to work for somebody else's yacht?
The filter exists because whilst PMCs can't build the ship, a founder can, they're fine at keeping it away from the rocks enough for relevant parties to extract wealth and guard it from the risks posed by hotshot up and comers.
Remeber the avg corp is relying on regulatory capture and offshore Java, maybe wrapping OpenAI if it's YC funded - there's barely double digit innovative tech companies for this mythical employee to even captain.
Re: Founder Mode
#39I am writing a book about an idea - software literacy is a new form of actual literacy and will be as impactful.
And I keep coming back to how important organising above the Dunbar number is and how bad economics etc is at this.
This resonates for me - and it’s still just grasping in the dark - but they seem to revolve around the idea that with software a company is no longer a lot of Dunbar number tribes working together through politics of their representatives (managers) but that action through the whole company can be co-ordinated through software (I even have the idea that the workers are CPUs so the coders are new managers).
Anyway the point is that founder mode might mean simply acknowledging that software runs / orgnaisies a company more than anything else - and building for that. What’s more important if your whole company is software controlled - relations between managers or the whole-org-test-rig?
Edit: apple famously has a run-book that is insanely detailed - basically instructions on how to run the org that builds the iPhone - this is software running a whole compmay. And if it’s software, it can be in one repo and that repo can be owned by Steve Jobs. Conceptually- that’s founder mode…. Maybe :-)
Re: Founder Mode
#40I 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 insig…
I don’t think he’s suggesting we can teach how to be a good founder in general. Just that we can study and then teach the difference between managing a team as a founder vs general management practices