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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#221

Post by hoosieree »

Imagine being so close to understanding something, but your whole identity requires you to not understand it.

Venture capital (VC) is fundamentally at odds with good business. VC demands exponential growth from a finite world; something has to give. What usually happens is the company grows to the point that it's impossible to keep the "professional fakers" away. Then the Iron Law[1] kicks in, or enshittification[2], or both.

Do you want the benefits of a small company (sustainability, happy employees, happy customers, good products)? Then build a small company. If you want the opposite of those things but also lots of money, try your hand at the VC blackjack tables. Maybe you'll be lucky and this time, it will be different.

[1]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail4...

[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Re: Founder Mode

#222

Post by steveBK123 »

ichik wrote: post #164

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 po…

I think a lot of companies get stuck in a "mess middle" where they've outgrown founder mode, but the people brought in to be responsible for various parts of the org chart are not actually empowered.

So you no longer have the permissive open structure of a small company, but are still small enough that the founder is arbitrarily/implicitly making a lot of decisions that have on paper been delegated.

For ICs/people lower down the org chart this is extremely disheartening because you end up reporting to someone who doesn't actually make the decisions, but instead shields you from the decision maker & the decision making process.

I've seen this in ~200-1000 person size orgs.

Re: Founder Mode

#223

Post by bearjaws »

> turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

What a long post to write "Well if you hire the wrong people they will drive the company into the ground"

Re: Founder Mode

#224

Post by tinco »

neom wrote: post #189
tinco wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think you did. You can't just switch founder for leader. A great leader would inspire the organization to work productively and effectively, but that's not what distinguishes the founder. The founder would make sure the organization is actually working on the most effective thing, and I think what Paul tries to convey is that one of the tools the founder uses to accomplish this is crossing the organizational t…

But what scale are we talking about? I've scaled from zero to IPO a couple of times, I've never seen past a few k people, airbnb is at 38,000. The only real world stuff I know to get about leadership and management at 38,000 people is learnings from harvard. I thought Brian was saying he manages his leadership team tightly, not that he spends a lot of time with ICs? I think that's conventional advice, manage your lea…

Okay, I've only scaled to 30 people so far, so anything I say is just me interpreting things I read.

I imagine from what I read about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang is that all three of them have/had unconventional management style in the sense that they're often amongst the IC's. Obviously you can't do that with all of your 30.000 employees, but I think they're just picking the teams that are most crucial at a certain point.

For example if Steve Jobs is managing Apple while launching the iPhone, I imagine he's talking to the VP of Sales in the management meetings, but he's not on the sales floor, nor is he sitting with MacOS dev teams or making sure motivations are high in the customer service department. But I bet you could find him in weekly iPhone design team meetings, and maybe he'd be shown progress on iOS every month and have a 3-hour brainstorm with a core team of senior devs on that team. Maybe they'd pull him into procurement meetings to make sure the capacitative touch screens would be made in the quantity they needed.

You'd have your VP's, directors and senior management making sure the ship sails, but you'd have the founder CEO present where they can have most impact, which just isn't in those top level meetings.

Re: Founder Mode

#225

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

Aurornis wrote: post #180
JonChesterfield wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A really special failure mode is to hire management from proper grown up companies to implement real processes for your aspirationally-real startup. Serious economic misunderstanding on multiple levels and a popular choice nevertheless.

My first exposure to big company management was, ironically, at a startup. They hired their C-level executives from big companies. Those executives hired VPs and extra layers of management who were also from big companies. Very quickly we had a deep org chart where ICs could be 5 steps removed from the CEO even though they hadn’t decided exactly what product we were going to build. Everything was done by committee in…

Honestly, the people that put in these processes are the smart ones. Useless as they are, they do climb the ladder, get good titles, and good pay.

Re: Founder Mode

#227

Post by kragen »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #193
kragen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the url? usually pg thinks lisp knowledge makes people more likely to succeed, not less

https://paulgraham.com/hijack.html > By promoting themselves from data to code, hijackers on September 11th promoted box-cutters into 400,000 lb. incendiary bombs Published September 2001

aha, this is awesome! and indeed the solution he suggests (locking the cockpit door) is the only one of the various security measures put in place to prevent a recurrence that is generally agreed to have been effective rather than just security theater

i want to give pg a lot of credit for clear thinking here, but of course if he'd suggested locking cockpit doors in august 02001 instead of september, that would have been significantly more impressive

your original summary of https://paulgraham.com/hijack.html was not correct

Re: Founder Mode

#228

Post by steveBK123 »

habosa wrote: post #160

The reason founders are different is because they generally own enormous chunks of the equity. Everything matters to them and the rewards of success are enormous. Us “fakers” get 0.1% if we’re lucky and then pg writes an essay saying we’re not trying hard enough. We are.

I think this is under discussed/not understood in startup land, particularly by the young. Maybe this is by design.

Of course the founder is highly motivated, they can become a billionaire if all goes well.

And the VC guys are essentially holders of a diversified basket of lottery tickets requiring that they attend some board meetings and give advice.

For the IC level, especially if not "founding engineer", the upside is an EV+ outcome where you make what, 10% more than if you just went the MAG7 route? The downside is you work 2x harder to make 50% less than the MAG7 route and ends in a layoff where your last paycheck doesn't even clear.

Re: Founder Mode

#229

Post by highfrequency »

I have a different resolution for the paradox about letting good people do their thing vs. micromanaging. PG’s resolution is to split on the CEO - are they a founder or a professional manager?

I would instead split on the employee: are they in a competitive position where 1) direct performance can be evaluated directly, and 2) multiple other people have a substitutable role and can thus fill in for any deficiencies / blind spots? Or instead is the employee’s seat a functional internal monopoly, where they have exclusive control over some key resource or process.

If it’s the former: management is trivial because evaluation is trivial and deficiencies don’t spread. But the latter case requires extreme vigilance from the CEO. This category encompasses all middle management. This vigilance cannot be delegated because the roles reporting to the CEO are definitionally the most susceptible to rent-seeking.

The challenge is that a portion of people in the first spot will always seek to maneuver into the second spot.

Re: Founder Mode

#230

Post by neom »

tinco wrote: post #224
neom wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what scale are we talking about? I've scaled from zero to IPO a couple of times, I've never seen past a few k people, airbnb is at 38,000. The only real world stuff I know to get about leadership and management at 38,000 people is learnings from harvard. I thought Brian was saying he manages his leadership team tightly, not that he spends a lot of time with ICs? I think that's conventional advice, manage your lea…

Okay, I've only scaled to 30 people so far, so anything I say is just me interpreting things I read. I imagine from what I read about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang is that all three of them have/had unconventional management style in the sense that they're often amongst the IC's. Obviously you can't do that with all of your 30.000 employees, but I think they're just picking the teams that are most crucial at…

"Their partnership began when Jobs appointed Ive as Apple's senior vice president of industrial design in 1997. Ive described their daily routine, saying, "We worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch together most days and spent our afternoons in the sanctuary of the design studio."

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/111457691.cms...

This is a great talk by Brian on why he is CEO, he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about designers not being CEOs from what I gathered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6h_EDcj12k

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