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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#161

Post by spencerchubb »

jodacola wrote: post #126
Chance-Device wrote: post #88

When a company is successful, by which I mean it turns a healthy profit and eventually even enough to go public, it ends up sustaining a lot more employees doing a lot less than a smaller, leaner company that can’t afford inefficiency. That doesn’t matter much to the successful company, it makes more than enough money to cover the inefficiency, and the inefficiency isn’t causing any real trouble - it just means that…

I’ve had a lot of conversations over my career about this general topic, and I still haven’t been able to answer: If a large, successful company operated extremely cleanly, wouldn’t that increase stock price even further? What are the disincentives to doing so (beyond the need for requiring more from people)?

An upper-level employee wants many employees under them. Then they can argue for a higher salary and have a good line on their resume.

Re: Founder Mode

#162

Post by naveen99 »

raziel2p wrote: post #108
naveen99 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well once ai agents become independent, and they start becoming full time employees, they should be allowed too…

Re: Founder Mode

#163

Post by spencerchubb »

lwansbrough wrote: post #106
amadeuspagel wrote: post #79

"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.

That's a case of an employee telling what not to do

Re: Founder Mode

#164

Post by ichik »

OTOH (writing from 20-year working experience with two thirds of it in early stage startups) more often than not founders are not actually competent technically or otherwise. And “letting people do their job” at best means a permission to speak up and endlessly argue with conflicting opinions from colleagues, but not a permission to execute if that means commanding others to do something, because the delegation of power to do that is not being given due to the aforementioned lack of expertise and inability to judge if an idea is good or bad.

Re: Founder Mode

#165

Post by lifeisstillgood »

talkingtab wrote: post #137

Our understanding of organizations completely derives from military and manufacturing. It is essentially top down. Heck, our whole society and schooling is top down. Someone else knows more than you and is better at things than you are. So if you want to be good at something, you follow. Guess what? So what is the alternative to top down? Another model is that the persons in an organization act in two roles. First th…

Absolutely

Re: Founder Mode

#167

Post by anal_reactor »

jodacola wrote: post #126
Chance-Device wrote: post #88

When a company is successful, by which I mean it turns a healthy profit and eventually even enough to go public, it ends up sustaining a lot more employees doing a lot less than a smaller, leaner company that can’t afford inefficiency. That doesn’t matter much to the successful company, it makes more than enough money to cover the inefficiency, and the inefficiency isn’t causing any real trouble - it just means that…

I’ve had a lot of conversations over my career about this general topic, and I still haven’t been able to answer: If a large, successful company operated extremely cleanly, wouldn’t that increase stock price even further? What are the disincentives to doing so (beyond the need for requiring more from people)?

Maintaining a good structure is a cost on its own. A good analogy is how most many engineers think "if I spend two days writing documentation then I'll save one hour figuring out things later, resulting in net gain of negative fifteen work hours, great job".

Re: Founder Mode

#168

Post by [deleted] »

getnormality wrote: post #151
neom wrote: post #130

This is conventional wisdom. https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-differ... https://hbr.org/2016/06/do-managers-and-leaders-really-do-di... https://hbr.org/2022/09/the-best-managers-are-leaders-and-vi... Almost every HBR "Must Read" series on enterprise management says the same thing as this blog post. The business world has been talking about this stuff since the 90s.

I carefully reviewed all three of these articles. While it's possible that I still missed something, I did not find any material that aligns with the unique point of Paul's post. Nothing that says leaders may have to directly engage with employees underneath their direct reports to understand what is actually going on in the company. It is perhaps possible to interpret these articles as saying anything whatsoever, bu…

[deleted]

Re: Founder Mode

#169

Post by neom »

getnormality wrote: post #151
neom wrote: post #130

This is conventional wisdom. https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-differ... https://hbr.org/2016/06/do-managers-and-leaders-really-do-di... https://hbr.org/2022/09/the-best-managers-are-leaders-and-vi... Almost every HBR "Must Read" series on enterprise management says the same thing as this blog post. The business world has been talking about this stuff since the 90s.

I carefully reviewed all three of these articles. While it's possible that I still missed something, I did not find any material that aligns with the unique point of Paul's post. Nothing that says leaders may have to directly engage with employees underneath their direct reports to understand what is actually going on in the company. It is perhaps possible to interpret these articles as saying anything whatsoever, bu…

Maybe I misinterpreted Pauls blog post, but what i got was: Mangers != Leaders, Leaders != Managers. Management and Leadership need to be well understood in any organization. Good Mangers can be good leaders. The CEO is often the manager of the leadership. This is effectively what they teach in the Harvard MBA.

Re: Founder Mode

#170

Post by nickpsecurity »

getnormality wrote: post #151
neom wrote: post #130

This is conventional wisdom. https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-differ... https://hbr.org/2016/06/do-managers-and-leaders-really-do-di... https://hbr.org/2022/09/the-best-managers-are-leaders-and-vi... Almost every HBR "Must Read" series on enterprise management says the same thing as this blog post. The business world has been talking about this stuff since the 90s.

I carefully reviewed all three of these articles. While it's possible that I still missed something, I did not find any material that aligns with the unique point of Paul's post. Nothing that says leaders may have to directly engage with employees underneath their direct reports to understand what is actually going on in the company. It is perhaps possible to interpret these articles as saying anything whatsoever, bu…

There’s been many news stories, business articles, and studies suggesting that. I don’t know how popular they are in management literature. I just know many stayed promoting this with high resistance from big business, management people, etc.

At the least, they said you need to hear directly from the people on the ground to know what they’re experiencing. The people on top could talk to them about what they learned.

Additionally, companies like IBM and FedEx used to give rewards to employees for ideas to improve the company. It was often a percentage of what those ideas made or saved up to a certain cap. A bunch of people would usually collect the max reward whenever this way implemented.

Those are a few examples that I saw show up in many places.

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