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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#571

Post by mustpax »

p1necone wrote: post #503
gregfjohnson wrote: post #446

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'…

I think the general issue here is that you can't observe successful businesses or individuals and copy their processes to be successful, because their processes are largely a symptom of their competency, not the cause.

Really well put. “Processes is a symptom of competence, not the cause” is a good motto.

Re: Founder Mode

#572

Post by kragen »

kazinator wrote: post #461
wahnfrieden wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://paulgraham.com/hijack.html > By promoting themselves from data to code, hijackers on September 11th promoted box-cutters into 400,000 lb. incendiary bombs Published September 2001

That doesn't say anything like that Lisp knowledge could have prevented the attacks. It does say that reasoning similar to reasoning about computer systems security could have led to better aircraft security. The code/data rhetoric is not exclusively an earmark of Lisp. A primary concern in security are situations in which what is intended to be data allows for a surprising malicious use whereby it effectively become…

agreed

as you know, though, there is a connection between this kind of security and garbage collection. specifically, if you're using a language that bounds-checks all array accesses, so array overruns are impossible, but relies on that same application programmer to free pointers manually, you can have a use-after-free bug, where a function pointer is written into heap space previously occupied by an array (or other data structure) to which a pointer still exists. if the attacker can cause writes to happen via that pointer, they can still break your security

garbage collection is a perfect guarantee against use-after-free bugs, unless of course the garbage collector is buggy. it's not the only possible solution; alternative solutions include statically allocating everything (abjuring dynamic allocation completely, like cobol), linear typing, never deallocating anything, and mlkit's region-based memory allocation are some alternatives which have been used. garbage collection is the most popular and probably the most practical

so it's not just that we have thousands of applications use the same debugged low-level buffer manipulation routines. it's also that we have thousands of applications use the same debugged garbage collector

i want to point out that even without having code and data in the same memory space, there are a variety of things an attacker may be able to do. when non-executable stacks, aslr, and w^x protections started being implemented, attackers started returning into libc; function pointers that point into the middle of libc would work just as well. (return-oriented programming might be more difficult, unless the thing being used-after-freeing was a large stack-allocated variable, which would be unusual.) and of course if there are shell commands, sql commands, java bytecode, or the like in data memory, overwriting them with malicious data may be just as good as uploading malicious machine code

Re: Founder Mode

#573

Post by vlovich123 »

jodacola wrote: post #126
Chance-Device wrote: post #88

When a company is successful, by which I mean it turns a healthy profit and eventually even enough to go public, it ends up sustaining a lot more employees doing a lot less than a smaller, leaner company that can’t afford inefficiency. That doesn’t matter much to the successful company, it makes more than enough money to cover the inefficiency, and the inefficiency isn’t causing any real trouble - it just means that…

I’ve had a lot of conversations over my career about this general topic, and I still haven’t been able to answer: If a large, successful company operated extremely cleanly, wouldn’t that increase stock price even further? What are the disincentives to doing so (beyond the need for requiring more from people)?

I think the main driver is a lot more simple than other people have said: when you don’t need that efficiency you can focus on resilience instead. As the pandemic showed with JIT supply chains, efficiency and resilience are often at odds. And the bigger you are the more resilience you want to protect your core business and let you just turn the fly wheel that’s making you profitable. That’s also why you see companies start to engage in monopolistic and anticompetitive practices - now that they have the weight they can waste resources on protecting their business instead of just growing it by being more efficient.

This is 100% bad from a country/market level but is what you get when you let local optimizations trump capitalism. In some sense that local optimization also isn’t bad - it’s not uncommon that that behavior is also what lets efficiencies be extracted.

In other words, in many ways all of this is inevitable behavior as things grow and a lot of it are themselves (perhaps inevitable) symptoms of the mechanics at play rather than the mechanics themselves.

In other words, once “founder mode” is documented, you’ll have everyone claiming they’re doing founder mode same as how everyone says they’re now doing agile or whatever other fad you want to pick and you’ll be back at square one until someone then invents “strategic founder mode” or “growth founder mode” and claims to have figured out how you can spot that vs what everyone is just pretending to do right now.

Re: Founder Mode

#574

Post by twelve40 »

corpMaverick wrote: post #482

Somebody here commented long ago about Bill Gate's style of management which reminds me of this piece. If you presented something to BG he would start asking questions and get deeper and deeper. He was merciless. It seemed that he was just making sure that you knew what you were doing. So your really had to be prepared. Someone as knowledgeable and smart as BG was able to keep the Bull shitters out of the development…

one can only wish he was just as thorough when deciding which convicted felon's private jet to board... must have slipped his mind that one time

Re: Founder Mode

#575

Post by twelve40 »

crop_rotation wrote: post #483
Animats wrote: post #479

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 operati…

> an auto company, or an aircraft company, In both we are seeing how professional management can decimate a company with several decades of history. e.g Boeing.

Boeing is a very strange example to give for this, because it's been under "professional management" for probably one whole century now. How does professional management suddenly decimate it today vs. say 1960, when it was also run like a corporation?

Re: Founder Mode

#576

Post by manofmanysmiles »

This thread seems beaten to death, yet I feel strongly that I'd like to express this:

Groups of people that work together share a common purpose, that is aligned with the individual purposes of all the people that make up the group. A great leader helps remind people that they can cooperate and all win, and uses the clear purpose to cut through bullshit. There are few people in the world that can do this.

Re: Founder Mode

#577

Post by thom »

Of the many problems with “hire good people and give them room”, the first is that you don’t necessarily know you’re getting good people. And if they are good you don’t know they’re good in your environment. You generally do know a founder is good if they’ve got scale problems, but obviously a lot of founders have failed before ever reaching that hurdle, and maybe would have benefitted from help.

But even assuming you can get good people in the door, the problem with giving them room is that you’re often creating something static and giving them ownership of it. When the world suddenly turns sideways and potential needs to flow through multiple people’s fiefdoms, at the very least you’ve created a lot of friction, but at worst you’ve erected impenetrable walls. That these problems can often only be solved by founders isn’t a surprise: when you create a a top down structure that doesn’t work, you can only fix it from the top. It’s exceedingly hard to delegate the one power that matters, which is the ability to reshape the business rather than optimise parts of it. If you can work out how to scale that without conflict then you can probably solve world peace while you’re at it.

Re: Founder Mode

#578

Post by sramam »

baby wrote: post #549
rawgabbit wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe it is that mysterious or revolutionary. What PG is describing is the “optimization of local maximum” problem. Founders focus on the strategic goal. Managers focus on tactical goals. Rules and processes are put in place to efficiently achieve these tactical goals. The problem is, in certain situations, these local process are at odds with the broader goal. Only the Founder has the authority to break th…

Do managers focus on tactical goals? Or do the engineers do that? Managers are more like the glue of the system, they don’t really provide much value besides that.

In the enterprise, the cost of failure to ones career/reputation is unreasonably high. pg's reference to "most skillful liars in the world" stuck out to me.

The extreme conservatism employed by managers to prevent failure - can only be summed up as "success at any cost". The consequence is decisions that spread the pain far and wide.

Unfortunately, these managers are not accountable for these consequences.

It's no winder that solutions take longer, cost more, are sub-optimal at almost every level. Furthermore, they very painful for the poeple who have to suffer these solutions. But hey, some unrelated manager-chain can claim success.

The worst of it is, these managers rinse-and-repeat at their next gig!

Re: Founder Mode

#579

Post by getnormality »

giarc wrote: post #158
getnormality wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I carefully reviewed all three of these articles. While it's possible that I still missed something, I did not find any material that aligns with the unique point of Paul's post. Nothing that says leaders may have to directly engage with employees underneath their direct reports to understand what is actually going on in the company. It is perhaps possible to interpret these articles as saying anything whatsoever, bu…

But even PG goes back on that by saying "Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount of delegation." So what he is saying is managers should talk to their reports. He writes like this is some groundbreaking realization, but to me I'm not even sure what he's getting at. For example he pushes back against the idea of hiring and…

He isn't going back on anything. This is a misrepresentative oversimplification of the text.

Re: Founder Mode

#580

Post by manojbajaj95 »

In footnotes, he mentioned that C level execs are good at managing up rather than down. As I've seen, this happens with a lot of founders who are busy manging VCs and other stakeholders that they completely rely on VPs.
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