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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#51

Post by blueboo »

Founder mode is implementing cliches well (hire pros, empower with agency) and manager mode is implementing them poorly (hire fakes, watch them fail)

That’s it, folks. As always, the devil’s in the details, not the Startup School maxims.

As Ed Catmull said, (lightly paraphrased) “everyone says story is everything, even if their story is drek…once you reduce an idea to a concise phrase you can use it without risk of changing behavior. What really matters is, what are you going to do about it?”

Re: Founder Mode

#52

Post by Archelaos »

While the problem description of how to scale a small company to a larger one and the solution offered of skipping the corporate hierarchy every now and then and being careful about delegating too much autonomy have merit, the main reason given by the author as to why the black box model of leadership is problematic does not seem very convincing to me, to say the least: "... 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."

If this really is the way founders describe it, it sounds more like a blame game: I, as the founder, was successful on my own when the company was small; now I have organised the company into a kind of small sub-companies that are not as successful; ergo, the pseudo-founders I hired for these sub-companies are impostors.

Rather, I think that we are "simply" dealing with fundamental management problems that have nothing to do with whether a company is relatively new or a century old, or run by a founder or run by a manager. It is more about size and managing innovation on a large scale, the flow of information and, to borrow terms from the military, a well-balanced command and control between strategic, operational and tactical levels.

Re: Founder Mode

#53

Post by eevilspock »

jasode wrote: post #15

>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 describ…

One might say the same of founders, but with respect to the org they are a part of: society. Founder? Nope, professional money extractor.

Anyone who's critical of, which is to say critically aware of, the underlying nature of capitalism will get what I'm saying.

Elon Musk (who proofread PG's post) is a master at extracting money from society and its government, while extracting labor from workers for minimal pay.[1] Zuck is a master at extracting money from society (by maximally playing to people's addictive tendencies and selling their attention to companies who want to extract more!). These types are driven by money and power, not by bettering society, though as masters of extraction they are masters of selling themselves as the latter.

Compare them to people who are driven not by money but by a desire to contribute: Albert Einstein, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds. If capitalism/markets were efficient, Albert Einstein would have been the richest person in the world, not Musk. The inventor of the web would be worth a lot more than the inventor of a web app that prey's upon people's addictive tendencies. Linus Torvalds' baby runs the internet (and android phones) yet his net worth is... Remember how Microsoft said open source was un-American, akin to communism? Now Microsoft is a master at extracting money from open source.

Capitalism's measure of net worth (money in the bank) does not correlate to actual net worth (positive impact on society).

---

[1]: btw, how is the Founder Mode he instituted at what was formally known as Twitter working out?

Re: Founder Mode

#54

Post by tikkun »

Founder mode examples I've noticed:

1. Steve Jobs approach:

- Multiple teams tackling the same problem with different approaches (done for Mac OS X and iPhone)

- Let the best approach win

2. Nat Friedman's take:

   "The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful. Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment. The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension. The downsides are worth it"
3. Stay connected to the customer

- Have a separate early adopter version of your product even when your company is big

- Founders taking customer calls (Eric Yuan, Zoom)

- Checking customer notes on X (Brian Chesky does this)

- Reading external cold emails from customers to the CEO, and replying to some (Steve Jobs and Bezos did this)

4. Stay connected to the reality of the company

- Anyone internally can email the CEO and suggest ideas, critique things

5. Have redundancy

- For any areas of the company that are critical, run two separate versions for as long as possible

- Humans have two of basically everything critical (except the brain, likely due to energy constraints): reproductive organs, hands, legs, eyes, ears, nostrils, why don't companies

Re: Founder Mode

#55

Post by mitko »

Tony Fadell’s idea of a Parent CEO vs Babysitter CEO in Build comes close to this founded mode concept but I am so glad PG memed the founder mode concept into existence, and talk about the gaslighting. And I bet he is right about there are many founders operating somewhat that way already but without a shared mental model and a name to it.

It is really hard to put in practice because of all the gravitational pull towards mediocrity.

Re: Founder Mode

#56

Post by theGnuMe »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #39

I 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 tog…

Do you have any more information on the run-book concept?

Re: Founder Mode

#57

Post by lokimedes »

As a hybrid MBA-Dev-PhysicsPhD who has refused to give up my technical and scientific skills to join the caste of managers, this resonates deeply with me. My guess to the effectiveness of “founder mode” is that this it legitimizes skill-boundary-crossing. When even competent engineers become MBAs, they can get disavowed by fellow engineers, and all level of technical input is “micromanaging”. But having full-scope founder-level rights to call BS at all levels, and do real time risk assessments af low levels while automatically matching it with the company mission, is so uniquely valuable, that the lack thereof is enough for me to posit that to be what we see when management changes. - It isn’t universally applicable, you do need to be gifted in the various aspects of the company, but still.

Re: Founder Mode

#60

Post by gizmo »

justmarc wrote: post #35

I think there's just a fundamentally different level of "care" between founder, and manager. Just like that of a parent vs teacher.

No that’s not it. Conventional managers are very ambitious and sincerely want their business to do great.
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