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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#61

Post by TrackerFF »

bboygravity wrote: post #33
gizmo wrote: post #9

The 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.

Let's ignore the fact that GameStop is a meme-stock.

Has Cohen actually improved the company? Revenue keeps falling, year by year, and other than having more cash on hand - not much seems to be changing.

Seems to me that every positive thing that happened to the company, can be credited to the pumping of the stock. The fundamentals haven't changed much.

Re: Founder Mode

#62

Post by hun3 »

tikkun wrote: post #54

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 o…

> (except the brain, likely due to energy constraints)

We have neuroplasticity :')

Re: Founder Mode

#63

Post by gizmo »

sethammons wrote: post #24
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.

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 giv…

He is a good example exactly because all exceptional executives are super unusual. Gates, Jobs, Musk, Bezos. They are nothing alike.

Huang defies management best practices and doesn’t do 1:1 meetings at all.

Re: Founder Mode

#64

Post by naveen99 »

tikkun wrote: post #54

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 o…

I don’t really understand why companies block lower level people from emailing ceo…

I would think you could get chatgpt to rank the emails in some way…

Re: Founder Mode

#65

Post by M5x7wI3CmbEem10 »

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…

I’m unable to keep up with book updates because both of the links on your profile are broken

Re: Founder Mode

#66

Post by diggan »

OJFord wrote: post #22
svnt wrote: post #7

We 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.

I think we've all came across people who chose technologies based on not what would be the best for the problem at hand + what they have the most experience with, but instead what is trendy today and can help them get hired in the future at the next workplace.

I'd probably describe that as "bad behavior" as you hire people believing they'll focus on improving things inside the company, inside of focusing on padding their CV. Of course, wouldn't be bad if it's both, but selecting the latter in front of the other seems non-optimal for the employer.

If you go through enough people like that, you end up with a ball of software spaghetti that anyone working on will struggle with, instead of a polished architecture ready to nimbly be changed when needed.

Re: Founder Mode

#67

Post by elawler24 »

Even as an early-stage founder, I get advised by smart people including investors, other founders, and past coworkers to hire other people to “help” me with hard problems. There has been some fantasy in the past decade that you become good at something as either a manager or IC or company - then get compensated highly, in perpetuity, to oversee others who do the hard work from that point forward. Today it’s being replaced by the new Brian Chesky ethos of accountability. I hope to see it bring back more aspirational builders back to the world of tech, replacing bloat and complacency. There is no easy button to creating outsized returns, so we should stop pretending.

Re: Founder Mode

#68

Post by parakalan »

I joined Glean recently and found out that hiring really smart people and letting them cook is a legit strategy, not sure if it disproves this article.

Re: Founder Mode

#69

Post by mejutoco »

maaaaattttt wrote: post #43
coahn wrote: post #18

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…

Also, I'm 99% sure that Steve Job once said (paraphrasing): "We don't hire talented people to tell them what to do, we hire them to tell us what to do". Which to me sounds like "Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs". So there is a discrepancy here as Steve Job is also used as an example of a "Founder Mode" CEO. Not saying there is a contradiction, just a piece missing somewhere in the essays logic.

I believe it was Henry Ford, or maybe both.

Re: Founder Mode

#70

Post by elawler24 »

OJFord wrote: post #22
svnt wrote: post #7

We 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.

It’s a balance. If you have people who only care about their career and not the company, you end up with misalignment. That’s why hiring people who are intrinsically motivated matters so much. People who demand personal growth without having proven themselves are likely less aware of the purpose of their employment. I’ve experienced this at companies where many people have only worked at late-stage, pre-IPO companies where neither the realities of early-stage or public markets exists.
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