Founder Mode

I frankly don't know why people keep using Airbnb now. It's costly, and the service is worse than a hotel. My worst vacations have happened in Airbnbs. Even for group vacations with friends, we now choose hotels. The good Airbnbs seem to be only the luxury or high-end types, suitable for very high-income or rich people.

I know my comment will sound too cynical or not well-received in a startup incubator forum. However, what I observed in common with the founders of the B2B startups I worked on was good networking.

The board members and initial contacts have much to do with the initial clients and the network effect it creates. It doesn’t matter if you have an excellent product. Without the initial boost of early adopters, you’ll struggle to survive. That’s why many founders go to SV or well-known startup incubators: the networking it creates is priceless. Of course, you’ll need to create a valuable product -and that’s the problem of many opportunistic startups leveraging current trends. Many startup pieces of advice I read seem to ignore the fact that you need money and contacts to have visibility in the right places (SV, elite university/circle).

While Paul Graham is a legend and I look forward to learning from his experiences, I believe that people in a position of privilege tend to overlook the advantages that come with their position.

For example, it is true that Steve Jobs started in a garage. However, both Apple founders were living in the epicenter of computing companies at the time. They both worked at HP and had contacts with people at Stanford. If you had built a personal computer in a garage in Latin America at that time, it would have been like a tree falling in the middle of nowhere.

Regarding Boeing, it's true that the principal-agent problem and misaligned incentives are issues. However, you must also consider the impact of promoting business school graduates and McKinsey-type consultants—who often believe they are the smartest people in the room, despite lacking operational expertise beyond making slides—to leadership positions in a company driven by engineering. Naturally, these business types will focus on short-term revenue and stock prices, as they have been trained their entire lives to optimize for vanity metrics like GPA, company prestige, and strategy over operations. This mindset is ingrained in their identity, leading them to undermine the engineering culture. For instance, Boeing's CEOs reportedly referred to engineering leaders as "retards" and "losers." Now, we are witnessing the consequences of these actions.

I wonder about the sibling comment about survivorship bias.

Specifically, I wonder if the reason "founder mode" strikes singular founders as a resonant story, is because it's representative of a story that can even have a singular narrative. The alternative (what pg calls "manager mode" of hiring the best people and letting them work) is perhaps one where there's more narratives unfolding and exploring the space. This could lead to either success or failure. Some spaces have less of a singular story, because they run and persist and thrive based on having multiple stories working together. Sometime the stories are dissonant. I've been in companies where the strength felt like it was in how a balance of things existed together, without the need to collapse them into a single totalizing narrative. This unresolved dissonance in a community can be either a weakness or a strength. The ability for a place or an organization or a community or a culture to hold contradictory truths, this allows a culture to hold within arms-reach an archive of more tactics and strategies (some useful in the current moment, some not), from which to call on when the environment changes, and new needs arise. That's how vibrant ecologies work.

Anyhow, this is a bit of a riff, and I imagine some people might be strongly opposed. I am not saying it's good or bad to be in founder mode. I'm saying it depends. But founder mode will tend to create singular founders who have a loud story to tell. The story is maybe less clear and loud when the other mode prevails and leads to success. It looks like a hundred ppl succeeding together, and no one person has the answer as to why, nor do they all agree on what that is. So it means that narrative will be more diffuse and less boosted.

Maybe more holographic in a metaphorical sense, where the information is encoded throughout a social fabric like a diffraction pattern, and no one person holds the whole narrative or truth, which emerges from the interaction of many narratives, both aligned and opposing (likely in small ways below the surface).

Context: I co-founded a tech community in Toronto (now ~7000 people), which for almost 9 years has run weekly participatory civic events (50-70 attendees), literally without ever missing a week yet. To put it lightly, we've learned a bit about distributed leadership, and my comments comes from that experience. It's very different from company modes, but some companies run on principles I feel quite aligned on.