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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#471

Post by campbel »

tgtweak wrote: post #465

You do need to hire great people and give them room - but that doesn't mean you ignore them and let them operate their business unit like a separate organization... You need to be involved as a CEO or other key decision maker. This philosophy of involvement follows through the entire org structure not just from CEO to the farthest position down the org tree. Let's not let this be a rug to sweep poorly-behaving founde…

If you want to scale out, you need to have other be responsible for chunks of the operation. And they won't be responsible unless they have autonomy. This doesn't mean 100% free reign, but it does mean giving up a certain amount of control.

Re: Founder Mode

#472

Post by jll29 »

Aurornis wrote: post #180
JonChesterfield wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A really special failure mode is to hire management from proper grown up companies to implement real processes for your aspirationally-real startup. Serious economic misunderstanding on multiple levels and a popular choice nevertheless.

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…

The mangagement structure always must reflect the size and the phase(!) of the startup itself.

What you describe sounds like a "founders just came together" trying to impersonate the IBM org chart without having figured out product-market fit yet, or even earlier than that.

Re: Founder Mode

#473

Post by bikamonki »

A friend bootstrapped his fastfood tiny chain to 5 locations and a couple of mill in revenue in two years. Low financial leverage, happy customers.

An expert told him to hire experts to keep growing it. Now he's down to two locations, high in debt and uncertainty.

Corpo bois are not founders, they know nothing of growing a startup. The have never produced value from thin air. They are just good at playing the corpo role. Job security is their main concern.

Re: Founder Mode

#475

Post by llm_trw »

tgtweak wrote: post #465

You do need to hire great people and give them room - but that doesn't mean you ignore them and let them operate their business unit like a separate organization... You need to be involved as a CEO or other key decision maker. This philosophy of involvement follows through the entire org structure not just from CEO to the farthest position down the org tree. Let's not let this be a rug to sweep poorly-behaving founde…

>Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

Not to be that guy but if you're hiring fakers than you're not hiring good people to do their jobs.

The reason why you can't hire good people is because they don't care about money, and from what I've seen bringing money into the equation actively drives them away.

This is not something that a company like YC wants to hear because it means that their whole raison d'etre is flawed. I'm willing to bet that if the Paul Graham who wrote On Lisp met the Paul Graham who wrote this article, he would have some pointed questions about what went so spectacularly wrong in his career that he sold out so completely.

God knows that the me from 10 years ago would have similar questions and he'd be deeply unhappy about the answers.

Re: Founder Mode

#476

Post by mells7 »

bcantrill wrote: post #356

This is a good piece in that there is absolutely truth to it -- but it's also a bit dangerously non-specific in that it potentially leaves founders with the notion that whatever they happen to think is tautologically correct. To supplement this piece, I would make three specific recommendations that I think tack into the same themes (namely: mistakes founders make -- including trusting the wrong people at the wrong t…

Unwarranted perspective from someone who is not a founder, but works with and has a lot of respect for them

I think the common thread between the two blogs is context and detail are important. I kind of think “Founder mode” is just doing your own diligence on your decisions rather than trusting heuristics or outside third parties. The “HR lawyers” or the “professional managers” are probably not nearly as tied to the company as the founder, and therefore unwilling to wade into the details and rely on such heuristics or “playbooks” for decision making or advice giving.

Tim does raise a salient point though in that finance functions are often overlooked or under invested, and siloed division. The whole company probably does not need to know the daily cash balance of the company, but team members should maybe think a bit more carefully about relative rates of return on their invested time or money, and “finance” is a good framework for doing just that. The best CFOs (or people more generally) look for that context (and help others do so too), so they can understand intuitively the impacts of potential decisions. Meanwhile, the professional managers run away from the detail and prefer to rely on playbooks and heuristics like the Conjoined Triangles of Success.

I don’t think it always has to be that way though, you just need people to care enough to wade into the depths of detail and care as if they were a founder.

Re: Founder Mode

#478

Post by jll29 »

hobs wrote: post #125
JonChesterfield wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either they're the founders or friends thereof or you're struck-by-lightening lucky. Realistically tell yourself that 10x developers are a silly myth and the people you were able to hire for pennies from the local demographic are the superstars, and try not to hang your business model on them actually being the best in their field. As long as you don't fact check that against reality it'll be OK.

> try not to hang your business model on them actually being the best in their field Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :) You probably can't afford the best, you probably don't need the best, you probably can't keep the best happy, you definitely don't have problems that need the best. That being said if you pay dollars instead of pennies you can find some decent folks and maybe save some money in t…

> Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :) You probably can't afford the best, you probably don't need the best, you probably can't keep the best happy, you definitely don't have problems that need the best.

You don't need the single best, you just should aspire as high a concentration of n * x for n>1 (2x, 10x, ...) as your talent to raiase funding permits.

But don't forget it's not all about "best coding"; you want people best in different things (PM, UX, architecture, security, databases, algorithms, compilers, documentation, networking etc. - also depending on what the product is about) - a diverse team of rock stars.

Re: Founder Mode

#479

Post by Animats »

Much of this hinges on what the company does.

AirBnB is basically a web site and a customer service operation. They don't own or run hotels.

Netflix started like that, but now they also create content. The web site part is basically operating a server farm with a halfway decent interface. The negotiation with content providers part is crucial to success. Netflix also creates content. That works more like a VC operation.

Movie making is interesting as a management problem. Strip away all the glitz, and it's a project business where a new team is formed for each project, they do a complicated one-off, and then disband. This works partly because of standardized roles and tasks. Sometimes it doesn't work, and whoever's funding the thing has to be funded for failures.

These are all industries where the question of what to do dominates the mechanics of doing it. Compare, say, a railroad, an auto company, or an aircraft company, where ongoing execution dominates. YC tends not to fund that type of company.

Re: Founder Mode

#480

Post by richardw »

I think the term is simply ownership. You choose what to own, and often good founders (and honestly managers) own anything that is important. There’s no “delegate and go home”, there’s “trust, but verify” and when verification fails, you get involved. You also own the failures. There is no CYA, there is only do.
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