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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#401

Post by eapressoandcats »

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.

It’s less a question of if they should be managers and more whether there should be formal title recognition. Many companies have “distinguished engineer” positions or similar, and those people are often involved in high level conversations.

In Jobs’ case, his personality was probably strong enough that didn’t matter but broadly it can be helpful to officially say, “this person is important even though they don’t manage anyone”. It helps with fairness so that people don’t have to seek out the “secret” ways of being important, and it can accelerate decision making in the absence of someone like Steve Jobs

Re: Founder Mode

#402

Post by tappio »

All is see here is that finding good people is difficult?

Being C level exec in another firm does not guarantee success. In fact, it might even be a dismerit for a startup.

Re: Founder Mode

#403

Post by mellosouls »

nberkman wrote: post #389
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"cracked" is a common term (eg) on social media and other informal use and is used meaning the same as "crack" above

(edit) see the urban dictionary definition in the sibling comment.

Re: Founder Mode

#404

Post by pajeets »

xwowsersx wrote: post #383
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 anothe…

Think this is the best answer. Founder mode should mean you have an unhealthy obsession with your product and vision.

The best example I can think of is the Costco founder threatening the newly arrived CEO who complained they were losing money on the hot dogs.

To me that is the single best example of Founder Mode.

Re: Founder Mode

#405

Post by thomukas »

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…

He was implicitly referring to what Chesky did recently at AirBnB (personal involvement in lower-level decisions eg product design in his case as it’s his forte).

Re: Founder Mode

#406

Post by zachthewf »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #245
whymauri wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can be a founder. Not everyone can be a leader.

Not everyone can be a founder. 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…

Pedantically, literally everyone can be a founder.

At this moment, you can decide that you are starting a company. You are now a founder.

(This is why Founder is historically an unprestigious job that smells a lot like Unemployed, though the startup hype cycle of the last 15 years changed that.)

Re: Founder Mode

#407

Post by eapressoandcats »

highfrequency wrote: post #242
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…

Great comment, curious to hear more about your perspective. > 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…

The reality is that no matter how much you decide to push authority down, at some point there will be conflicting decisions and you need to resolve that. Most organizations lean escalation upwards eventually to the CEO to resolve disputes.

If tech is trying to make changes that impact another major business area, and chaos needs to be avoided, then if you want to avoid executives being involved then members of that org need to be empowered to agree on those changes. However if you do that without structure it’s easy to just end up with organizational chaos as you wind up massively multiplying the communication channels that need to be pushed lower in the org. Someone needs to limit and direct the people responsible for those decisions if they’re not going to make them themselves.

Re: Founder Mode

#408

Post by gniting »

Anyone know why PG still insists on having his posts be in a format where readability seems to be the least important thing? I am sure there's a solid/sound reason, and I am genuinely curious to understand it.

Re: Founder Mode

#409

Post by YZF »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #361
j45 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not straight forward at scale

Care to elaborate? Most things boil down to client side features like streaming the video with HLS or DASH, even if it's not live just to get the encoding benefits. DRM is its own thing. I think it's important to have the distinction between delivering video content and the in-app experience. I do think streaming VOD is way easier than live content.

You also need a CDN. NetFlix deploys boxes all over the place to cache the content.

I agree there's nothing in there that's not understood from an engineering/technology perspective. It's not fusion or curing cancer. But scale and complexity compound simple engineering problems. There monitoring, there's billing, there's machine learning, there's software lifecycle, multitude of different devices types and networks, all of that at extreme scales that need to work pretty reliably.

Re: Founder Mode

#410

Post by bloodyplonker22 »

sowbug wrote: post #346
dmurray wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pitch…

Is it possible this essay about founder mode is itself written in founder mode? Whatever the "it" is that constitutes a startup's purpose often can't be fully articulated in mission statements, OKRs, core values, etc. Either it's simply ineffable, or it's a metamorphosizing snapshot of the leading edge of a rapid process of discovery. Expecting such an already-abstruse concept to faithfully percolate down a rigid rep…

You keep speaking of "it". I have had experience with "it". Sometimes it turns out that "It" is this very scary clown show that percolates down into the rest of the organization in a "cover your ass" mentality that is simply based on nothing but personal incentives to not be fired. "It" can indeed be percolated by clowns in the organization in this case.
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