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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#291

Post by moffkalast »

bjornsing wrote: post #277

One of the reasons Europe is falling behind in tech I think is that founders are pushed to manager mode much earlier, and going founder mode when the shit hits the fan is just about impossible [1]. 1. If you think you have it bad with the “professional fakers” in the US, try an alternative reality were they can’t legally be fired, or even demoted (e.g. Sweden).

Can confirm, I know of a small tech startup in southern EU that was founded by an American MBA wannabe type. Immediately after getting a mid sized B2B contract he pivoted into manager mode, expecting to grow to 200 people rapidly, and as one might expect the entire company imploded from disfunctionality in less than a year. Of course that was not the only issue that sank it, but I'm sure it contributed.

Re: Founder Mode

#292

Post by svnt »

OJFord wrote: post #22
svnt wrote: post #7

We need to go a bit further than just calling out lying: the people who both appear qualified due to larger-organization experience, and who are looking to escape to a startup role, are often those whose techniques depend on the naïveté of others. They have lived in an environment where new employees are fungible. Employees are not fungible in a startup. The other fatal flaw is that in larger orgs there is almost no…

> Bad individual behavior — prioritizing career progression over company success I don't think that's bad behaviour (the 'especially at the expense of others' deliberately aside) - that's correct behaviour? Unless it's your company. But the key is, ideally, to have goals aligned such that the prioritising personal progression means doing great things for the company.

It sounds like you have never been in the position of e.g. establishing hiring protocols and used those not to get the best people into the company, but instead to ensure that no one who has the potential to outperform you gets hired.

At the IC level sure, it is your manager’s job to create alignment. At the hiring level pg is talking about, they are deciding which of those people to bring in, and they think about it in at least as much detail as you when you design the intricate functions of the next product you ship.

Think about it like this: you have the chance to build a product that wins every trial but you won’t get anything more in the process, or you can design a product that is less competitive and sends you personally $ every time it is trialed, whether or not they buy. Assume no one will ever be able to definitively prove which one you did.

Re: Founder Mode

#293

Post by evantbyrne »

mihaic wrote: post #159
mdorazio wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you incentivize people to do what was best for the company rather than only for themselves? What percentage of it did they own? Why should they ignore their own self-interest in favor of your company's long-term success? There's a weird cognitive dissonance I've run into where career advice from most people on HN boils down to "Companies don't care about you. Optimize your own total comp. Jump ship when oppor…

> Why should they ignore their own self-interest in favor of your company's long-term success? I wasn't expecting them to do something bad for themselves, merely to simply do what I was explicitly asking and paying them for (and we paid above-market salaries). Too often communication was conveniently misinterpreted in obvious bad faith to justify them using some expensive AWS feature, or simply ignore the core messag…

Engineers should always be considering the business impact of their decisions, but it's also the job of management to create and enforce that culture at every single level. On the other hand, it is also suffocating to talented engineers to have to try and predict how their bosses would do something and emulate that instead of just doing the work, and I think this push-pull is where most engineering managers fail their employees. Too little control and the less engaged/talented engineers will make decisions that tank the project, too much micromanagement and velocity tanks. With that said, regardless of where engineering management sits on the continuum of control, outcomes will suffer if managers are just simply bad at engineering and making business decisions, which is also often the case.

Re: Founder Mode

#294

Post by smugglerFlynn »

This whole article is written around one key sentence:

  > There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.
But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5 more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete.

And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like people are discussing Paul’s new clothes without actually voicing out what they are talking about.

What the hell is “Founder mode”, exactly?

Re: Founder Mode

#295

Post by bjornsing »

RichardKain wrote: post #234

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 eff…

You don’t think the HBS crowd has kind of a vested interest here? They are on the top of the professional faker totem pole for god’s sake. :)

Re: Founder Mode

#296

Post by fallinditch »

tlogan wrote: post #253
trunnell wrote: post #246

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…

The issue is that we don’t have a clear understanding of what “founder mode” truly entails. But, I predict that once Reed Hastings leaves Netflix, the company will begin to decline.

PG's commentary is interesting but I think he is leaning towards an unsatisfactory conclusion. He's trying to simplify management into modes but in reality life is more complex and nuanced.

Chesky's experience instead says to me that as managers we should be be wary of all advice and management styles and playbooks. For sure it's good to listen to advice and learn about management but life and managing a business are so much more complex than any set of rules or observations can describe.

In fact, since every organization's situation is unique, then managers should take all advice and accepted wisdom with a pinch of salt and forge ahead with their own unique set of principles for their own unique set of challenges. This is what Chesky deduced.

I would also go one step further and assert that it's a positive sign if a founder goes against the grain and breaks the rules - success is more likely than if they follow the established way of doing things. This is innovation.

Perhaps this is the 'founder mode' that PG is trying to uncover: think different.

Re: Founder Mode

#297

Post by nicodjimenez »

trunnell wrote: post #246

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…

I bet that Reed Hastings has a sub organization at Netflix that is run in founder mode, even if most of the organization is run in manager mode.

Whether orgs are run in manager mode or founder mode depends on whether there is a founder level leader available and nature of the changes that need to occur for the organization to remain competitive. Some orgs or sub-orgs cannot afford to have a founder making radical changes, because the risk this will lead to an exponential rise in defects for end customers is greater than the potential benefit.

PG tailors to startups and for startups the risk of the wrong product is generally much greater than the risk of product defects. So I tend to agree with his points here.

Re: Founder Mode

#298

Post by CityOfThrowaway »

trunnell wrote: post #290
trunnell wrote: post #246

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…

Good points in pg's essay: * CEO/founder should engage directly at multiple levels rather than only interact with the company through their direct reports. (Same applies at every management level, btw) * Delegation is good, and it should happen in proportion with trust. * The dominant culture at many tech companies is flawed and sub-optimal. Bad points: * "Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides". The…

There are many very good reasons why the top 100 most valuable people would not be the department heads.

Cracked engineers, designers, growth people, AEs... the best ICs shouldn't necessarily be in management positions. Yet, the CEO should neither be air-gapped from those people nor managing their work/career on a day to day basis.

Re: Founder Mode

#299

Post by narrator »

Jensen Huang of NVIDIA uses stochastic sampling instead of status reports[1]. Kind of sounds like the same thing. Dig deep stochastically into the organization. Also sounds like "management by walking around," which was the style at HP under Hewlett and Packard[2]. I think the reason professional managers dislike these methods is they lack technical understanding of what the business actually does and instead focus on the financial aspects.

[1] https://www.apolloadvisor.com/unconventional-leadership-of-j...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around

Re: Founder Mode

#300

Post by [deleted] »

raghavankl wrote: post #289

From an execution perspective, I believe it makes more sense to start from the top down. Workers should believe that their boss is a boss because they can synthesize ideas.

[deleted]
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