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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#601

Post by joshvm »

bikamonki wrote: post #473

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 r…

This is partly why I enjoyed working at, and respected, my old company so much. Having owners who had been burned by terrible managers in the past, and who had families to support made a big difference in terms of the risks that we would and could take. I never worried about losing my job. Rather than try and find seed funding, we just took on projects that we knew could deliver, built relationships that allowed us to continue those projects and slowly grew the business out.

Re: Founder Mode

#602

Post by cm11 »

I'm very much in line with the the gist of what's being said here. That said, there are a couple of discrepancies I think.

First, I don't think Founder Mode works as a name. He's saying all the founders are being told to grow their company the wrong way—the Manager Mode way. Chesky is unique in that he's ignoring them. Most Founders are doing Manager Mode not "Founder" Mode.

It's possible the name could work because it describes what Founders should be doing rather than what they're currently doing. It's meant to capture that people who start a company have a much different interest and emotional investment in the mission and company. This distinction is important (and has been told many times). I'm not sure that model holds so tight anymore. Being a tech founder today is a mainstream and maybe default path today for many, it's not a weird one that you'd have to be crazy about what you're trying to build in order to attempt. Founders are choosing founding first and searching for ideas second, and then pivoting those ideas as a best practice of founding.

Pick a random company that's sent you a recruitment email—look at what they say they do and then ask yourself how many people might be excited about that. Take an interview with a small one, you have a good chance you'll talk to a founder or someone quite high—this person frequently does not seem interested in this. Even without a successful product or an exit, the VC round is paying them a good salary to startup. A recent thought I've been having is there's a little more opportunity now to treat founding as a salary job, not really an equity play.

"As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale." The problematic norm to me in tech is the opting for organizing functionally (dividing into engineering, design, marketing. etc.) to scale. Related to this is the problem with PMs at most companies. If they're good ones, they should be leaders. Yet they don't own much nor manage anyone (they're ICs with no reports). And so Chesky removed them or guided them to something more specific like PMM.

Re: Founder Mode

#603

Post by nlitened »

codingdave wrote: post #466
mihaic wrote: post #75

After two unsuccessful but still alive start-ups, I've come to very similar conclusions. Absolutely every single time I've tried to say to it anyone other than a founder I was met with disbelief that eventually turned into accusations of not knowing how to be a leader. While I do admit that I didn't fire people as quickly as I should have, most of our structural problems came from employees simply doing what was best…

> employees simply doing what was best for them No leader should expect anything different from their people. It is your job to align the incentives so that what is best for the employee is to do those things that are best for the company. If you are relying on people to do what is not best for them out of loyalty to a corporation/startup/vision, you do not have an accurate pulse of the modern work force. And yes, wh…

> > employees simply doing what was best for them > No leader should expect anything different from their people

But then there are generals who lead soldiers to die so that a war is won. So at least there exists another mode of leadership not covered by your statement.

Re: Founder Mode

#604

Post by madmask »

bongodongobob wrote: post #501
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right. People here will deny it, but who is smarter: someone who attends cushy meetings all week and gets paid millions, or someone who burns themselves out hacking away at code 80 hours a week making $200k a year? Congrats, you are very smart and know how to manipulate symbols real good. Try cashing that check at the bank.

Do you prefer meetings or solving problems? Pretty sure I’d jump off a bridge after 2 weeks of meetings

Re: Founder Mode

#608

Post by blackoil »

I think idea boils down to know enough of your companies and subordinates' work and working to smell any bullshit they try to peddle. If founder does that, it trickles down as all under them will have to know enough about things below them to keep up.

In Joel Spolsky's blog about his Excel review by Bill Gates. Gates knew enough about Excel/123 and company to make sure if the person knows what he is talking about. Same can be said for 6-page memo culture of Amazon.

Re: Founder Mode

#609

Post by dilyevsky »

sixhobbits wrote: post #197

Professional managers will absolutely run a company at 20% optimization while founders might get to 80%. But if the founder gets hit by a bus it's going to drop to 2% or die. Professional management is like a lot of software tools, you can build a better framework yourself that is better suited to your usecase but no one else knows how to use it or can learn in a reasonable amount of time. This isn't saying managemen…

Running at 20% optimization means certain death or at best zombification for startups that haven’t reached escape velocity so there’s that

Re: Founder Mode

#610

Post by TremendousJudge »

phonon wrote: post #415
torginus wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit off topic, but I've never understood while people hold Netflix as some engineering Holy Grail. Their product is straightforward feature-wise, and pushing a low-teen megabits per second of static video data on the internet in a somewhat timely manner is not a huge technical challenge nowadays (or 10 years ago). Doing stuff like real-time video streaming, where you have to encode and push video to users with…

Bingo! Watch and be afraid.... https://youtu.be/s-vJcOfrvi0

All that effort to make a weird "feature" that no user actually wanted. The reason it took them all that work to do is that the assumption that you wouldn't reorder seasons was baked into the architecture. For the engineers that designed it was just unthinkable, and for good reason.
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