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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#211

Post by fwip »

Eumenes wrote: post #206
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.

LLMs excel at regurgitating conventional wisdom. Paul, on the other hand, is doing it poorly.

Re: Founder Mode

#212

Post by kragen »

elawler24 wrote: post #74
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…

Staying in the details is different from micromanagement. It’s the difference between understanding (and deeply caring) about what’s happening vs. telling ICs how to solve a problem. You can’t be a good leader, mentor, or decision maker if you’re not invested in the details.

are we talking about steve jobs here? iphone in the fishtank steve jobs? roundrects are everywhere steve jobs? because that sounds pretty close to telling ics how to solve a problem

Re: Founder Mode

#213

Post by ta988 »

giarc wrote: post #158
getnormality wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But even PG goes back on that by saying "Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount of delegation." So what he is saying is managers should talk to their reports. He writes like this is some groundbreaking realization, but to me I'm not even sure what he's getting at. For example he pushes back against the idea of hiring and…

There is a balance between letting people run free, and controlling every tiny decisions. You have to keep the direction and vision, and you have to make sure everyone is going toward that. But you shouldn't trust they will do it by themselves (they may not have internalized it as much as you do either) and you shouldn't trust your ability to deal with every detail of the complex system you are trying to build. If you hired specialists that's also because you were lacking some abilities, not just because you want extensions of yourself by lack of time. And if you hired generalists that's because you needed glue to make the whole operation work with a level of understanding that you can't allocate your time to, and because you may lack the variety of skills that allow for efficient communication with the specialists.

As with any complex system, you have to be careful about degrees of freedom, too many and it can break down and too little and it can get seized.

Re: Founder Mode

#214

Post by tarcon »

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…

I think the emergent order we see in society and how we could use it to effectively organize our work exists in the background thoughts of Brian Robertsons Holacracy. He mentions it in his introductory talk at TEDx.

Re: Founder Mode

#216

Post by baxtr »

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.

But when pg says something the fanboys get excited!

Re: Founder Mode

#217

Post by whymauri »

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…

Anyone can be a founder.

Not everyone can be a leader.

Re: Founder Mode

#218

Post by fwip »

raziel2p wrote: post #104
ackbar03 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yep. Friends of the founder also get more political/social leverage in the org, so they get more resources to execute their ideas, and their results are valued more highly by leadership.

Re: Founder Mode

#219

Post by kragen »

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…

you're describing societies, not companies. societies rely on forms of collaboration that are more resilient than delegated authority. liberals often point out markets—i don't have to depend on the goodwill of the butcher and baker, etc.—but other forms like charity, science (including open-source software), and reputation systems are also crucial to enabling nyc to exist

delegated authority is fragile in the face of people making mistakes or just prioritizing their own interests over the interests of the group—as people often do. markets, published reproducible experiments, generosity, and gossip also suffer from those, of course, but they're better at self-correcting

Re: Founder Mode

#220

Post by steveBK123 »

sixhobbits wrote: post #197

Professional managers will absolutely run a company at 20% optimization while founders might get to 80%. But if the founder gets hit by a bus it's going to drop to 2% or die. Professional management is like a lot of software tools, you can build a better framework yourself that is better suited to your usecase but no one else knows how to use it or can learn in a reasonable amount of time. This isn't saying managemen…

A benign summary of what professional management brings to large orgs is essentially variance reduction.

Set up organization, process, systems, etc such that 99% of the staff becomes more or less interchangeable in the long run. This allows organizations to outlive their founders.

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