Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 772 posts

Re: Founder Mode

#201

Post by j45 »

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’d say HBR reading leaders often lead an existing company that they weren’t the founders of. Or maybe it’s not a founder led company anymore.

Founders have to lead themselves and other while going from 0 to 1.

I’m not sure what you are saying is accurate.

Even if Paul was rewriting a topic… more than one writer writes about a topic for their readers, no?

The MBA form of management using people as process .. is increasingly less applicable and in need of updating .. where software increasingly can push papers and connect people and processes.

We don’t see this much in management consulting or MBAs very much. Maybe there’s a benefit to leaving how the world was.

Re: Founder Mode

#202

Post by neom »

sarbak wrote: post #188
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.

Leader and founder is not the same thing. I think the key difference is that a founder has a much better understanding of the company as a complex system. This understanding includes not just how people think it works at a certain point. It includes all the previous attempts, reasoning behind those attemps, the context of past failures and successes, the personal dynamics behind those choices. Complex systems are not…

I think there is an interesting question in: should more founders be public market CEOs leading their vision? That is a super interesting question imo. We had a lot of discussion about this at DigitalOcean pre ipo, it's the main reason I left, and after I left the CEO was still my best friend and after a lot of conversation, he didn't feel like public market exec sounded that interesting either, the whole founding leadership team switched over. I'm not sure about the other guys, but a couple of us basically said "we're founders not public market execs" and bowed out. I say kudos to Brian, Jeff Lawson, Matthew Prince etc for doing both, because I've heard that the job in the public markets can get brutal.

https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stock-screener/founder-led-com...

Re: Founder Mode

#203

Post by Aurornis »

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

The problem with Steve Jobs advice like this is that it doesn’t work out of context.

I worked for a VP and CTO who embraced this advice literally: They wanted to hire smart people and have them decide what would be done. They took it to so much of an extreme that they washed their hands of the responsibility for deciding and executing anything. Their job, they thought, was to call us to meetings and then ask a lot of questions about what we were going to do.

The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually get important things done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from other departments about the important cross-organizational factors of getting software implemented and adopted.

Instead, it was never-ending circles of Socratic method questions: What do you need to succeed? How will your team accomplish that? Who can you talk to make that happen? Whenever we tried to make it clear that we needed them to do some work in the organization, we got a lecture about learning how to be self sufficient and get things done ourselves.

Not surprisingly, little got done. We wrote the software fine, but any time we encountered issues that required VP or C-level collaboration we hit a wall. You can only defer to IC employees to tell you what to do for so long. Beyond that point it’s just laziness.

This is also a stark contrast to how Steve Jobs actually operated, which by all accounts was extremely demanding, dismissive, and command-and-control with him at the center.

Re: Founder Mode

#204

Post by arauhala »

If I'm reading this correctly, a few themes PG touches here are:

1) loss of control when hiring a professional manager without intrusion to sub organization, because you rely on the manager provided information. If the manager is not straightforward, the sub organization may become a black box, where issues can go unseen

2) Lack of access to the frontline people and their understanding, which is opened by the Jobs like key people meeting across the org

3) Id also imagine that if you have a founder with deep domain knowledge, who has worked across all aspects of business, going fully hands off with the details, and replacing decision makers with more generic managers potentially from other industries, means that lot of expertise gets disconnected from the relevant decisions.

Ultimately the outcomes are all about the decisions and the decisions are all about understanding, which is all about the information. As such, it's not surprising if cutting the seasoned founder from both key mid level decisions and the firsthand information flows brings disadvantages.

I'd over all interpret the article to be about how hands on the founder should be about the different aspects of the business rather than the leadership, as implied elsewhere

Re: Founder Mode

#205

Post by redbell »

> Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own

This is why I still strongly advocate that, at some point in your career, you may consider reinventing the wheel if needed.

> In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode.

An interesting video [1] from Logically Answered referred to CEOs of type manager mode as Vanilla CEOs. In short, the video raises questions about innovation versus stability; while these Vanilla CEOs excel in financial growth, they may lack visionary leadership that is a built-in feature in the founder's DNA.

_________________

1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3RV8nMzh8

Re: Founder Mode

#206

Post by Eumenes »

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.

HBR is certainly conventional, but the content is pretty much indistinguishable from what a LLM would tell you. There's a reason its popular among HR careerists, the PMC, and MBAs. All the content just reads like generic self help literature to me. I far prefer the casual nature of a blog post from someone like pg.

Re: Founder Mode

#208

Post by vslira »

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 think you’re being too dismissive of a third kind of player that is neither “leader” or “manager”, which is “owners”.

There’s a saying (which I’m sure has an English equivalent) where I live that goes something like “It’s the owner’s gaze which fattens the cow”.

Owner vs manager is the original “AI alignment problem”, usually taught as the principal-agent problem in business schools, and is very real. SV-type founders are, by and large, meaningful owners in their enterprises and thus heavily invested (literally) in the company’s performance. Professional managers, leaders or not, are just selling their labor. There is a whole field of management science about designing proper compensation structures to make CEOs better aligned with shareholders, but you get that quicker by making them the same person.

Of course there’s a whole other world of majority shareholders leveraging their position to extract value from minority shareholders, which is just another version of the same problem.

All this to say, you’re right that there’s prior art about what he’s writing, but its the principal-agent problem, not leaders vs managers, and in general business literature does not equate the issue of founder ownership with the PA-problem (obviously any undergrad can link the two issues, but that’s not how they’re usually approached)

Re: Founder Mode

#209

Post by kragen »

mejutoco wrote: post #69
maaaaattttt wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

henry ford was also pretty far from this warren buffett mode of letting the upper management of the company do what they want. very deeply involved in every level of the company, much like steve jobs

Re: Founder Mode

#210

Post by sharkbot »

I’m thinking of the metaphor between Newtonian and general relativity. At low energies, masses and velocities the two theories correspond in predictions with little discrepancy. If the velocity/mass/energies increase dramatically, then Newtonian physics will fail to give accurate predictions.

Same with “hire smart people and let them work”. When salaries are relatively low, consequences are limited and incentives are well aligned, that approach works. As soon as any of those things change, then the “manager mode” fails dramatically.

As someone who ascribes to “manager mode” most of the time, I’m going to start looking more at places where the assumptions break and (carefully) try out “founder mode”.

Post reply on HN