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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#231

Post by detourdog »

breck wrote: post #198
detourdog wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t think of people as superstars. Think of them as individuals that are able to pay attention and consistently meet expectations. I’m starting to think paying attention to what is happening is undervalued.

> paying attention to what is happening is undervalued. Heavily agree. But paying attention to what is happening _in nature_. Pay little attention to what is happening in symbolia. I got rid of my cell phone 2.5 years ago after my daughter kept saying "no phone dadda". Forces me to pay attention to nature and real world every moment I'm not at my computer. Huge life improvement in every way.

Wish I had listened to my 2.5 YO.

Re: Founder Mode

#232

Post by dasil003 »

naveen99 wrote: post #64
tikkun wrote: post #54

Founder 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…

Because the judgment of tens of thousands of individuals on the importance of their particular issues and the framing of said issues in a way the CEO can understand does not correlate with their disposition towards emailing the CEO.

Re: Founder Mode

#234

Post by RichardKain »

I think the vast majority of businesses are run in "Founder Mode," and maybe the majority of start ups. That's why they don't make it. The books about delegation from the HBS crowd are in some respects a reaction to that default mode.

Chesky and Jobs are obviously managerial outliers for their extreme accomplishment. Anytime one cites Jobs as a guru I'm reminded of an evaluation Bill Gates made about Jobs, to the effect of: entrepreneurs think Steve Jobs was an asshole, so they can be one too. But they're not Steve Jobs.

Even then: Airbnb in Founder or Manager Mode efficacy is very hard to disentangle from Airbnb and Covid. With no Covid, manager mode continues - would it be worse off? Hard to say. Apple has done exceptionally well (at least financially) under Jobs' successor Cook, surely in manager mode.

As other commenters note there are ample examples such as Nvidia (or Valve, Bloomberg, many others) which run as surprisingly flat but scaled organizations.

Fear of the ossifying effects of bureaucracy is a consistent theme in PG's essays for good reason. Finding ways to incentivize/align middle managers with the same urgency a founder has is another. "Founder mode" in the wrong hands drives away other good managers and is perhaps best used in the Ben Horowitz framework of Wartime instead of Peacetime for companies.

But boy I really do wish to have seen the original speech, surely more replete with details that answer my objections. I love the professional liars observation, they are the antagonists to both good founders and good managers.

Re: Founder Mode

#235

Post by marxisttemp »

AirBnB is contributing massively to the housing crisis. I can’t wait until their parasitic business is banned from every continent! Paul Graham is buddies with Peter Thiel btw

Re: Founder Mode

#236

Post by anonymousDan »

I think an interesting question this raises is what are the differences between effective founder mode companies and manager mode companies in terms of communication structure and how can this be modelled and analysed (e.g. using some kind of network analysis of a temporal graph).

Re: Founder Mode

#237

Post by [deleted] »

steveBK123 wrote: post #220
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.

[deleted]

Re: Founder Mode

#238

Post by detourdog »

kragen wrote: post #192
detourdog wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t think of people as superstars. Think of them as individuals that are able to pay attention and consistently meet expectations. I’m starting to think paying attention to what is happening is undervalued.

'individuals who consistently meet expectations' is not only not the same thing as 'superstars', it's nearly the opposite. doing the unexpected is a defining attribute of superstars. an individual who consistently meets expectations is incapable of simultaneously being a superstar. they must exceed them, and to an astounding degree, to qualify as a 'superstar' by any normal definition of the word many superstars aren…

The only difference between what you wrote and what I wrote is that you removed the first filter and critiqued my comment becuase the second filter failed.

The ability to pay attention is where the unexpected comes from in my judgement. The whole world looks at something and tunes out early because they think they understand. An individual that is truly paying attention notices all the subtleties that that can be used for a fresh solution.

My point is that an inconsistent superstar is not as good as an individual with a consistently fresh solution.

Going out one more layer I thought the topic was how to have a stable organization with consistently fresh thinking. I responded to a topic discussing how to attract superstars. I believe anyone has the capability of being a superstar in the right environment.

Re: Founder Mode

#239

Post by Isamu »

sjm-lbm wrote: post #200
Isamu wrote: post #195

Walt Disney worked in founder mode. That was partly enabled by his brother running the purely “business” end that would have taken up much of his time. So Walt was able to get involved all the way down to the smallest details. The downside is that when he died he left an organization that relied on that strong founder making things work. Bob Iger is a delegator that handles the business, he doesn’t get deeply involve…

When talking about Disney, I also think it's worth tossing Michael Eisner into the mix as a comparison point for a non-founder who operated in something really close to the "Founder Mode" that the article describes. He got involved in creative decisions, and - speaking to the article's mentioning of micromanagement - famously said that 'micromanagement is underrated.' His style seems close, at least, to the style the…

I agree, although maybe Eisner was a bit of a hybrid, and was able to be a bridge between the founder model that Disney relied on for years and the current structure.
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