Checks out from this old account of a BillG review:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
Founder Mode
101–110 of 772 posts
Re: Founder Mode
#102The 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…
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Re: Founder Mode
#103"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us." -- Steve Jobs
How do you guys actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? And not just the typical friend you know who's "a pretty smart guy" and his friend and so on
Either they're the founders or friends thereof or you're struck-by-lightening lucky.
Realistically tell yourself that 10x developers are a silly myth and the people you were able to hire for pennies from the local demographic are the superstars, and try not to hang your business model on them actually being the best in their field. As long as you don't fact check that against reality it'll be OK.
Re: Founder Mode
#104"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us." -- Steve Jobs
How do you guys actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? And not just the typical friend you know who's "a pretty smart guy" and his friend and so on
maybe the superstar idea is somewhat of an illusion, and they are actually just some pretty smart friend of the founder?
Re: Founder Mode
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
Unfortunately, I suspect the structure of the tech industry has kinda made this inevitable. If you need to jump ship every few years to get a meaningful wage increase, and companies are happy to drop the axe on an entire team because profits went down 0.01%, the incentives are to do whatever's needed to keep yourself hireable at all costs.
So everyone picks what will look good on their resume in a few years, not what actually solves the issue in the most optimal way possible.
Re: Founder Mode
#106"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us." -- Steve Jobs
But then you hear about stories of employees coming to Steve’s office to give a presentation about how such and such technology isn’t possible, then Steve says yes it is figure it out, and they do.
Re: Founder Mode
#107After two unsuccessful but still alive start-ups, I've come to very similar conclusions. Absolutely every single time I've tried to say to it anyone other than a founder I was met with disbelief that eventually turned into accusations of not knowing how to be a leader. While I do admit that I didn't fire people as quickly as I should have, most of our structural problems came from employees simply doing what was best…
Where the founders are also acting in their self interest but have enough correlation between self and company that this works out? If so non-trivial equity to non-founders might have the same properties, provided they haven't already been savaged by founder liquidity preferences.
Re: Founder Mode
#108Founder 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…
chatgpt (or an equivalent) may also be able to write an email crafted to get to the top of that ranking.
Re: Founder Mode
#109> "Skip-level" meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there's a name for it.
Elon put this great, in 2018:
> Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the "chain of command." Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.
Re: Founder Mode
#110After two unsuccessful but still alive start-ups, I've come to very similar conclusions. Absolutely every single time I've tried to say to it anyone other than a founder I was met with disbelief that eventually turned into accusations of not knowing how to be a leader. While I do admit that I didn't fire people as quickly as I should have, most of our structural problems came from employees simply doing what was best…
> most of our structural problems came from employees simply doing what was best for them and bad for the company
I've seen this play out a lot as well with management. It's a classic principle/agent problem and one of the best solutions i've seen is flatter orgs where everyone has a primary work responsibility beyond pure management.