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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#381

Post by nathanappere »

mlloyd wrote: post #327
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Be the ultimate judge of what excellence means to the company. Enforce this directly, in direct communication with people doing both a good and a bad job, instead of rigidly relying on chain of command. 2. Break the rules if the rules are stupid. Pay excellent people out of band, for example. 3. Directly fire people for incompetence and accept that some of them will sue you. Whatever. Rather pay the settlement tha…

> 2. Break the rules if the rules are stupid. This.

> Fix the rules if the rules are stupid"

"Pay excellent people out of band, for example." why not fix the band ?

Re: Founder Mode

#382

Post by torginus »

crdrost wrote: post #351
torginus wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit off topic, but I've never understood while people hold Netflix as some engineering Holy Grail. Their product is straightforward feature-wise, and pushing a low-teen megabits per second of static video data on the internet in a somewhat timely manner is not a huge technical challenge nowadays (or 10 years ago). Doing stuff like real-time video streaming, where you have to encode and push video to users with…

Slightly bigger challenges Netflix faces: • You have deals with N big media companies who each have their own restrictions on who can stream what from where. The list is constantly changing, so permissions to view media are locale-specific and revokable; you need a way to say “okay this person is not allowed any more to do that.” • Multiple-screen detection emphatically needs to be rock solid. Someone is going to unp…

> You have deals with N big media companies who each have their own restrictions on who can stream what from where. The list is constantly changing, so permissions to view media are locale-specific and revokable; you need a way to say “okay this person is not allowed any more to do that.”

Yeah, international media content licensing is very likely Netflix's moat. I'd wager starting a streaming service, and getting the big studios to host their content is pretty much impossible.

Recommender systems are pretty well studied, and anyways, I'm sure it's significance for Netflix is overrated. People (including me) tend to watch the show everyone's talking about. It's a much more hairy issue for a site like Youtube, where users upload decades worth of content every day, and the site has to figure out what to show to which viewers, where the content's shelf-life might be measured in days, so building up collaborative filtering data might not be feasible.

All the other technical issues are probably non-trivial, but I don't think any of them requires world-changing engineering prowess.

Most engineering is non-trivial. If I attempted to design a washing machine, I'd probably fail miserably, and figuring how to do it well probably took collectively thousands of engineer-years. Doesn't mean it requires exclusively unicorn engineers.

Re: Founder Mode

#383

Post by xwowsersx »

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…

I don't disagree with your criticism of his post, but to your question — as best I can tell, "founder mode" means maintaining a high level of personal involvement in product design and decision-making, even as the company grows. Trusting and delegating tasks to specific individuals but retaining a hands-on approach.

To some extent, the concept must remain vague because its meaning will vary from one company to another. Typically, there are one or two critical aspects that are most important for a startup or company, and the founder must be involved in those areas in a way that conflicts with the usual corporate structure or hierarchy.

Anyways, this is how I understood it.

Re: Founder Mode

#384

Post by bewaretheirs »

PG wrote:

"Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports."

Whatever happened to "Management by Wandering Around"? Usually credited to HP but Shakespeare had Henry V do it (see act 4 scene 1) and there are probably even earlier examples.

Re: Founder Mode

#385

Post by bjornsing »

talkingtab wrote: post #137

Our understanding of organizations completely derives from military and manufacturing. It is essentially top down. Heck, our whole society and schooling is top down. Someone else knows more than you and is better at things than you are. So if you want to be good at something, you follow. Guess what? So what is the alternative to top down? Another model is that the persons in an organization act in two roles. First th…

> There were no CEO's in small communities.

Now go tell Sitting Bull.

Re: Founder Mode

#386

Post by seagullriffic »

> At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time in his life, forgot to take notes.

Is there a recording? It's very frustrating to read things like this and not be given a link.

Re: Founder Mode

#387

Post by nlh »

Disclaimer: I am NOT a big company guy, and I generally fight tooth-and-nail against the enshittification that happens when startups grow beyond a certain point, so I've got a bias here.

I think, for once, pg is dead-on with this post, and I'm glad it's being brought to light. Too many managers and founders live in fear of the dreaded "micromanager" label and stand back and watch their companies turn to crap.

The thing is - if you have a vision for what's needed to make your product or company truly successful and the people working for you aren't hitting the mark, you have to get in the trenches and make it work.

Here's the dreaded scenario:

Your company is working on a new product (or a new version or whatever) and you, the stalwart CEO, have left it to your team to build without getting too into the mix lest you be labeled a micromanager. It's not going in the right direction and for whatever reason it's not hitting the mark.

Do you have the cajones to tell the team to go back to the drawing board, even if your delegated manager thinks it's going well? The launch will be late, the team will be annoyed ("Damn that CEO getting into our business again"). I bet a lot of CEOs don't, and this is why companies turn to crap over time. pg's point here is that the CEO needs to be willing to think like a startup CEO and be willing to go into founder mode and get his or her hands dirty to make sure the product nails it.

This is hard but necessary!

Re: Founder Mode

#388

Post by maxnevermind »

jmb99 wrote: post #369
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…

My company of ~1600 currently does annual retreats with 90-110ish people. All of the C suite and their direct reports, but also a good number of engineers and other ICs, as well as some “line-level” managers, and 10 people who have been identified as “up and comers” (usually ICs relatively early in their careers, but not exclusively - over the last decade, probably 30-40% have been managers of some sort who were well…

A side question.

> ...Just because you’re a top performer...

Do you just trust performance reviews for finding them? My experience in BigTech that those can't be always trusted. It seems getting good reviews is a skill and some people are better at it while some others might not even care about ratings at all.

Re: Founder Mode

#389

Post by nberkman »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #313
boredtofears wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"Crack", not "cracked".

"Crack": adj., first-rate; excellent: a crack shot. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/crack

"Cracked": no such meaning https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cracked

Re: Founder Mode

#390

Post by aspenmayer »

swalsh wrote: post #278
Aurornis wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a few Steve Jobs quotes which have tanked the tech industry. The quote "If I'd ask customers what they wanted, they would've told me a faster horse." for example is absolutely horrible advice for 90% of companies. It implies you understand your customers business better than they do. For simple B2C businesses, that might be true. For complex B2B businesses, it's very likely not true. If your founder spent dec…

I know it’s not your main point and you may already know this, but that’s usually attributed as a Henry Ford quote, not Steve Jobs. From context, you seemingly imply its Jobs’ quote, without specifically attributing it to him.

But in researching this, it’s all pretty ambiguous but a decently relevant HBR article came out of it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150209203853/https://hbr.org/2...

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