251–260 of 772 posts
Oh, that's easy: "founder mode" means the founder is hyperfocused (or in the oldspeak, obsessed) on his work (with his company) and optimizes (micromanages) everything. We know that already. Perfection demands micromanagement. Steve Jobs was actually doing that - reaching down the ranks and directly helping (molesting) people doing some piece of a larger product he particularly cared about. It also often causes (or i…
I've been occasionally mentioning this book on HN since I read it. Linked below. The book is about how companies evolve and how teams of people work together. It uses human growth as an analogy and fairly accurately describes how companies fail or thrive at different stages. It's older at this point, but it's about human behavior and group dynamics, which don't change rapidly. The book doesn't use the phrase founder…
Counter-example: Reed Hastings, co-founder and the CEO of Netflix for 22 years, famously did the opposite of what pg is saying. Reed insisted on a particular style of employee freedom & responsibility that IMO set the benchmark for innovating year after year and avoiding micro-managers, even as it scaled up past 2000 engineers. This story still has not been fully told. Reed was closely involved but perhaps the opposi…
But, I predict that once Reed Hastings leaves Netflix, the company will begin to decline.
These businesses usually don't grow that much, but they are very stable over time, even across economic downturns, because the owners/founders think long term.
The managerial perspective is "just pay people more to motivate them" or otherwise "strong vision will motivate".
But paying someone more (at least beyond a class threshold) is only likely to motivate them in the short term. After a few months, they go back to hedonistic baseline.
"Strong vision" is just corpo-speak for corpo-speak. Real vision comes from a founder pushing as many sides of the company as possible, often by example rather than meetings.
Interestingly, our United States seems to have this problem. Genius and scrappy founders establish a government now overtaken by incompetent suits.
It may be the natural way of things. Success leads to complacency leads to incompetence. Eventually new players take over and the cycle repeats. Creative destruction and all that.
Do people consider the following people to operate in Founder Mode:
- Elon Musk?
- Larry Ellison?
- Mark Zuckerberg?
- Marc Benioff?
- Drew Houston?
Counter-example: Reed Hastings, co-founder and the CEO of Netflix for 22 years, famously did the opposite of what pg is saying. Reed insisted on a particular style of employee freedom & responsibility that IMO set the benchmark for innovating year after year and avoiding micro-managers, even as it scaled up past 2000 engineers. This story still has not been fully told. Reed was closely involved but perhaps the opposi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
'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 use…
whether 'an inconsistent superstar is not as good as an individual with a consistently fresh solution' depends on the situation. if you're in a situation where that's true, you're not looking for superstars, and you shouldn't try to intrude your decision criteria into discussions about people who are
> I believe anyone has the capability of being a superstar in the right environment
that's, i'm sorry, just bullshit. the wrong environment can prevent you from being a superstar—imagine if madonna had been born before recorded music, or in taliban-governed afghanistan—but the reverse is obviously false. no environment could have converted me, this body, into madonna or messi or jimi hendrix or bruce lee or meryl streep or jeff dean. that's pure wishful thinking
i don't think the discussion is about how to have a stable organization of any kind. it's about how a startup can kick ass. to what extent stability promotes that is a point under debate, not a premise we have stipulated. i can tell you that there is some degree of chaos that makes kicking ass impossible, but from experience, it can be remarkably high, and stability inevitably trades off against chasing superstars. that's because superstars are unpredictable by nature—not just when they fail but also when they succeed! a new product line that obsoletes everything your startup has done so far is a lot of instability, and it's what you are hoping for if you are trying to hire superstars in a startup
ignoring that is just self-deception, and trying to impose obviously ridiculous redefinitions on the conversation in order to cover it up doesn't do the discussion any service. if you want to argue that chasing superstars is a dumb idea, which is a reasonable point of view and correct in many situations, then make that argument—don't try to redefine common terms to conceal the disagreement
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks for explaining my link back to me