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The big thing missing from pg’s essay is how the professional managerial class has this big filter where only those who are willing to jump through hoops for 20 years get to the c-suite. In businesses of any size it’s just not possible to get promoted straight up the ranks in your 20s no matter how good you are. Seniority trumps ability. Founders are excluded from this filter process and to nobody’s surprise founders…
"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…
> 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.
Would it be fair to diagnose this as an issue where the tech side of the business ran in an open, proactive way but other departments had a top-down mentality that required interfacing with the head of your department?
In other words - do you think it is a necessary/desirable feature that ICs need organizational authority from the CTO to push major changes? I get that given how the rest of the org functioned, it would have been much better to have more top-down mentality from the CTO. But is there a better equilibrium where this is not required?
The big thing missing from pg’s essay is how the professional managerial class has this big filter where only those who are willing to jump through hoops for 20 years get to the c-suite. In businesses of any size it’s just not possible to get promoted straight up the ranks in your 20s no matter how good you are. Seniority trumps ability. Founders are excluded from this filter process and to nobody’s surprise founders…
> it’s just not possible to get promoted straight up the ranks in your 20s no matter how good you are. Seniority trumps ability. Experience. Experience and wisdom is what trumps the exuberant overconfidence of an ignorant youth.
In my simplified view, founders care about the company like it’s their baby. On the other hand, managers tend to focus more on their own careers, their teams, and external relationships. This is natural since they know they’ll likely move on to a different company at some point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But in my experience a good founder doesn’t necessarily make a good leader. Not a CEO anyway, but it depends on the role of the CEO. If the the CEO is “chief strategy and opportunity officer” then some founders are often quite well suited to it.
But we should bear in mind that all founders do not have the same skill set. Woz was also a founder of Apple and a great engineer but not a CEO.
Sounds like chesky and pg want to turn the tide on that dominant culture in software companies. And I couldn't agree more! A big problem IMO is that most "professional software managers" are taught a management style that focuses on risk. Risk-aversion permeates every decision from compensation to project priorities. It's so pervasive it's like the air they breathe, they don't even realize their doing it. This is how things run in 99% of companies.
So, my fellow hackers. There is a better way. It's neither the Steve Jobs model nor the John Sculley model. Looks like pg has not yet found it. I hope he does, though. It would be great for YC to encourage experimentation here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? You have to become a superstar first. I had the good luck of living down the street from the AirBedAndBreakfast founders in San Francisco in 2008 and we'd commute together to our Tuesday night YC dinners in Mountainview. I picked up early that Nate was already a superstar coder, Joe was a superstar designer, and Brian was a superstar…
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.
Consider the famous Osbourne Effect[1], so named after a founder who blew it spectacularly.
Or how about the famous fraudsters whose schemes got so large because they lacked basic controls? (Ponzi to Madoff, but also Elizabeth Holmes and SBF)
Or how about Jack Welch (GE) and David Calhoun (Boeing), lauded for years until their damage came to light?
I struggle to see "founder mode" as something that scales. Is there not some self-selection bias occurring here, given the audience "included a lot of the most successful founders we've funded"? If a founder is exceptional and all of the other stars necessary for a startup to succeed have aligned, this may be a good approach. But then we are just back to the question YC has always tried to answer: what makes a founde…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…