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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#311

Post by boredtofears »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #298
trunnell wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think there's any reason to believe IC's who follow the "cracked engineer" manifesto would be in the top percentile. It's basically a guideline to make people more manageable and has little to do with engineering talent.

Re: Founder Mode

#312

Post by goatherders »

Eehhh... this overlooks the fact that a company not reaching its expected potential should, by default, change what it's doing. Suggesting that more startups could avoid failure by changing management style is true...and fairly obvious.

Companies hiring the wrong team members may well be the bigger problem. Plenty of companies succeed by building great teams. Plenty fail by hiring the grifter class.

I do agree that CEO/founders need to learn that being "in" the business is required longer than expected.

Re: Founder Mode

#313

Post by CityOfThrowaway »

boredtofears wrote: post #311
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think there's any reason to believe IC's who follow the "cracked engineer" manifesto would be in the top percentile. It's basically a guideline to make people more manageable and has little to do with engineering talent.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Cracked is just slang for insanely talented, ergo...

Re: Founder Mode

#314

Post by didgetmaster »

When it comes to employees at every level; there seems to be two general attitudes that can make or break a company.

1) Those who try their very best to contribute more than they extract. They want to be compensated fairly to be sure; but they see their role as to bring value to the organization that is in excess to what they are paid in salary and benefits.

2) Those who want to extract as much as possible in return for as little value as they think they can get away with.

These attitudes exist at all levels from the CEO down to the lowest contributor on the organization chart.

Whether you use 'founder mode' or 'manager mode' to lead; building a culture that hires, keeps, and promotes the first type and tries to avoid the second, is critical.

No company of any reasonable size can only have the first kind, but many an organization that should have been successful, will go under when the second kind becomes pervasive.

Re: Founder Mode

#315

Post by kaplun »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #294

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…

A founder lives their company as the most important thing in their life, it's an extension of their life and they live and breath the company. A manager instead is being given a responsibility and will try their best to fulfill the role. A founder will never rest if they know there's an issue to be solved in the company, while the manager has a life and know they can move forward in case. A founder will not be intimidated by any internal policy or rule if they believe they need to change something. A manager will try to play by the rules, and in case try to modify them through influence. A founder is basically a ruler who truly care about the success of the company (not necessarily about the happiness and fulfilment of the people taking part in the company). For a funder the Company comes first, before anything else.

Re: Founder Mode

#316

Post by dmurray »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #294

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…

Based on pg's other work, I would guess that previous drafts of this essay had concrete examples, but they were removed after deciding that including them would make the discussion all about those specifics.

But in general I think it's clear: founder mode here means having strong opinions about all parts of the company. Maybe it's a technical founder telling salespeople what they should emphasise in their sales pitches, or a nontechnical founder giving directions on choice of technical architecture. (And I think either of those examples would provoke different reactions in most people here).

Re: Founder Mode

#317

Post by svnt »

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…

Hastings is rather unique in the current founder era in that he had previously founded a company, recognized he did not have the ability to manage it, attempted to step down, and then was told by his board to figure it out. He went on to essentially succeed in this and take his company public.

Here is a person that recognized the problems of the stage pg was talking about, undertook a deliberate study of them, was successful enough in managing them, and then went on to found and grow Netflix.

Most founders have not previously taken a company public, especially via Hasting’s humble route. Having done so would enable him to prevent exactly the kind of problems pg is referring to while still being himself.

Jobs and Hastings have very different personalities and methods, but both probably achieved the same function within their organizations.

Re: Founder Mode

#318

Post by [deleted] »

sarbak wrote: post #188
neom wrote: post #130

This is conventional wisdom. https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-differ... https://hbr.org/2016/06/do-managers-and-leaders-really-do-di... https://hbr.org/2022/09/the-best-managers-are-leaders-and-vi... Almost every HBR "Must Read" series on enterprise management says the same thing as this blog post. The business world has been talking about this stuff since the 90s.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Founder Mode

#319

Post by dosinga »

This sort of glosses over that Jobs was pushed out of Apple for good reasons the first time around. His second coming was spectacular but Founder Mode Apple in the 90s would have crashed

Re: Founder Mode

#320

Post by detourdog »

kragen wrote: post #259
detourdog wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i mostly agree with your first filter, but your second filter excludes all superstars, turning your comment into nonsense as a whole 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…

I disagree superstars are human one should expect failures from humans.
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