441–450 of 772 posts
Life is random, there are no unconditional rules for success in competitive spaces. Discretion is always key. Sometimes luck plays a role: PG’s silly LISP startup as a prime example.
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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…
I was reacting to the idea that the "top execs" are generally not the people you'd want. There was an undertone in pg's description that seemed to me like, "SJ hated those stupid and ineffective managers so he bypassed them to invite the people doing the real work."
I've worked in places with some ineffective managers, and at bigger companies I've witnessed a few ladder-climbing sociopathic liars, so I get the sentiment.
I just think it's more useful to figure out how to remove those ineffective people, or better yet build a cultural immune system that rejects them, rather than bypass them.
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 think Paul is pointing at something I've heard described as integrated complexity, basically someone who can hold the entire business in their head and understand how all the problems interact at all levels of abstractions. Not everyone can do this, but the people who can are better served if they exercise the ability because it improves alignment and accountability. When you assign a person to a problem (hr policy…
I've also seen founders that weren't really at a level where they could "founder mode" and micromanaged things badly. Those founders are the ones that tend to apply the bad advice pg discusses and who can't really tell the difference if they've hired a good or not so good person and whether they're doing a good job or not.
I totally agree that you need people with the ability to hold the big picture in their head. This can be the entire company but it can also be one product or project within the company. Trying to construct this picture out of pieces in multiple people's heads is vastly inferior and is a factor in the failure of projects/products and companies. You can't separate vision/what/how across people.
What I don't think we want to take away from this is that the founder is always right or that you shouldn't hire good people and let them do their job. I don't think these two statements are accurate. The "founder" (or manager) does need to make sure that things come together, i.e. you don't have engineers building the wrong things. But you do need good people and you do need to let them do their job.
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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.
In every case I've seen with healthy leadership, you could just ask who the top people are. Up to about 200-person size groups, you could ask any leader (even the top group leader) and they could just tell you. Because they generally know who is doing what, how difficult the various things are and who is turning in consistently outstanding work. (If the leadership can't do this, they might not be paying close enough attention.)
Performance reviews can serve many different purposes, but I don't think this is one of them.
"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us." -- Steve Jobs
To re-iterate: What I believe PaulG is saying is that there is a crucially important phenomenon that we don't yet understand, and naming it will facilitate the process of bringing it into focus so that we can help more companies be successful.
His footnote has a painful resonance: "I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it."
This is exactly what has happened to the Agile methodology.
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My first exposure to big company management was, ironically, at a startup. They hired their C-level executives from big companies. Those executives hired VPs and extra layers of management who were also from big companies. Very quickly we had a deep org chart where ICs could be 5 steps removed from the CEO even though they hadn’t decided exactly what product we were going to build. Everything was done by committee in…
Honestly, the people that put in these processes are the smart ones. Useless as they are, they do climb the ladder, get good titles, and good pay.
These people are not the smart ones, but the ones who are really good at doing "company politics" and "playing political games" (which are very different skills from being smart).
My personal opinion is that it is rather a sign of smartness to see through all of this. But unluckily the people who are capable of this lack the political power and backing of other people to get "dangerous" for these "ladder climbers" (or if they do become dangerous, it is for the same reasons easy to "get rid of them" (e.g. fire them)).
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Agree completely, this is an essay without a thesis, or any valuable evidence or argument. This is a C- college essay at best. I’m sad about that because I was very interested in the title.
But, he's right. I'd rather a C- college essay that is saying something right than an A+ that is very convincing bs. A decent number of well rated business books are the latter.
Nearly none of these comments are grounded in his actual text.
I grew up seeing founder mode first-hand. My dad founded Celestron, and he operated just as Paul is describing. At my current company, I see the CEO doing the exact same thing, which gives me great hope. Huge contrast from my previous start-up, for which I have great anti-hope unfortunately. (Current company is Zap Surgical Systems, with Dr. John Adler as the founder.) I've seen John everywhere, all day every day. I'…