Founder Mode

Probably, but before we assume that Steve's management style was unabashedly good at scaling... well, it reminded me of this story from a former Apple employee:

https://techreflect.org/2019/05/horsey/

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There used to be a weekly meeting with Steve Jobs to go over user interfaces and workflows for macOS [...] with the higher ups [...] After this meeting, there would be a “debriefing” where one or more of the attendees of that meeting would report to the underlings. Sometimes that included people like me. [...] What was fun about these debriefings is that they were like a game of telephone.

1. Steve might say something in the weekly meeting

2. Someone would jot down what they think he said

3. The notes might get passed to someone else who would go to the debriefing

4. Someone in the debriefing would relay their version of what was written down

The debriefing was a meeting often consisting of puzzled looks.

One time an icon change was being proposed. The note we got in the debriefing was that Steve said it was “horsey”, which prompted endless discussion:

• What does horsey mean?

• Is horsey good or bad?

• How do we make something less or more horsey?

• Is the horsey-ness something minor that needs tweaking or so major that it needs to be redone?

• Did anyone just ask Steve what the hell he meant?

[...] People would sometimes present the same content [to Steve at next week's meeting] and Steve would magically “change his mind” but I often wondered whether [...] what appeared to be a change of mind was just a message that was garbled in the first place.

There was definitely an element of control as well. Some of the higher ups who had closer access to Steve wanted to exercise more control than perhaps they had. For example, the horsey comment could be tweaked to fit a change someone below Steve felt needed to be made. Since not everyone had speed dial access to Steve, it was easy to take advantage of any ambiguity.

The other question I have been asking myself is regarding the SJobs retreats. They definitely happened during the Macintosh era but were they used during the second era. My impression is that they created a toxicity. It makes sense that CEO of large organization will hear names through the grapevine and want to get direct input.

I see the founder to be idiosyncratic and there is alway tension be that a desire for consistent environment. I think a good founder is able to compartmentalize the idiosyncratic from the supportive resource mechanics were humans like consistency.

No doubt SJobs was in Founder mode when he had all the CNCs at NeXT painted black and distorting the machine's tolerances.

That might be personal bias, but I think the idea that PG is developing here already stem a lot in the Agile movement (not the software one, the general one). The problem is that, as PG mention, there is probably not one founder mode, but more like a set of them. This makes their academic description harder to conceive.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I think a large part of running a successful business is having a well defined niche / problem you solve. Getting to that point comes with a bunch of barriers and risks, and joining an organization that has that already figured out seems like it can have some advantages?