Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 772 posts

Re: Founder Mode

#611

Post by mizzao »

trunnell wrote: post #338
svnt wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hastings is rather unique in the current founder era in that he had previously founded a company, recognized he did not have the ability to manage it, attempted to step down, and then was told by his board to figure it out. He went on to essentially succeed in this and take his company public. Here is a person that recognized the problems of the stage pg was talking about, undertook a deliberate study of them, was su…

I agree and I’m following you right up to your last statement. I’m doubtful that Jobs and Hastings had similar functions or operated similarly. I worked with Reed but not with Steve. I know a few people who interacted with Steve, and their stories don’t sound anything at all like how Reed operates.

GP said "different methods" presumably indicating not operating similarly.

Re: Founder Mode

#612

Post by kapad »

trunnell wrote: post #246

Counter-example: Reed Hastings, co-founder and the CEO of Netflix for 22 years, famously did the opposite of what pg is saying. Reed insisted on a particular style of employee freedom & responsibility that IMO set the benchmark for innovating year after year and avoiding micro-managers, even as it scaled up past 2000 engineers. This story still has not been fully told. Reed was closely involved but perhaps the opposi…

Reed Hastings is also equally famous for having a rather non-traditional managerial style. Especially the "keeper test".

> If a person on your team were to quit tomorrow, would you try to change their mind? Or would you accept their resignation, perhaps with a little relief? If the latter, you should give them a severance package now and look for a star, someone you would fight to keep.

I agree with some of the other replies. That Hastings was very aware of two things - He's not the best manager - Corporate manager's are full of bs

IMO, the "keeper test" and some of the other famous and/or controversial policies at Netflix are a direct approach at avoid "manager mode".

Re: Founder Mode

#613

Post by [deleted] »

madmask wrote: post #604
bongodongobob wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Founder Mode

#615

Post by orthoxerox »

picafrost wrote: post #28

I struggle to see "founder mode" as something that scales. Is there not some self-selection bias occurring here, given the audience "included a lot of the most successful founders we've funded"? If a founder is exceptional and all of the other stars necessary for a startup to succeed have aligned, this may be a good approach. But then we are just back to the question YC has always tried to answer: what makes a founde…

> I struggle to see "founder mode" as something that scales. Is there not some self-selection bias occurring here, given the audience "included a lot of the most successful founders we've funded"?

That's what the article is about. The "common knowledge" is that it doesn't scale at all, that as soon as you become an established company you need professional managers. Paul provides counterexamples that prove it can scale and when it does it benefits the company immensely. He is hesitant to recommend this management mode outright because he doesn't know:

- what exactly do these founders do that makes their management more effective than business administration - what the limits of founder management are - how to trace the limits across the org chart

Re: Founder Mode

#616

Post by kapad »

torginus wrote: post #332
trunnell wrote: post #246

Counter-example: Reed Hastings, co-founder and the CEO of Netflix for 22 years, famously did the opposite of what pg is saying. Reed insisted on a particular style of employee freedom & responsibility that IMO set the benchmark for innovating year after year and avoiding micro-managers, even as it scaled up past 2000 engineers. This story still has not been fully told. Reed was closely involved but perhaps the opposi…

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…

A bit "off" the off-topic point.

- I'm not really sure Stadia can be called a "technical achievement at scale". Mainly because it didn't achieve all that much scale to begin with. Definitely a technical achievement in cloud gaming. But the implementation at scale is something that I now see Sony and Xbox working toward (along with their console partners - hardware and software).

- Youtube, definitely, given the content base, the number of active users at literally anytime, is a monumental achievement. But so are a bunch of porn websites. And I know the porn industry doesn't have a good rep. Even in engineering. Still, porn sees more active users than Youtube and netflix combined, albeit, on a bunch of different websites, but a few large enough websites that are comparable to Youtube in terms of active users, and catalogue size. Also, these companies manage to host all of this content and delivery it all over the world on a much smaller budget than Youtube. Not to take away any of Youtube's achievements, but from a technical point of view, I do think the porn industry wins. To begin with, porn streaming is older than youtube, but quite a few years actually. Additionally, from what I've heard, some of the popular live streams on OnlyFans (and similar websites) see more concurrent viewers than most YouTube live streams.

Re: Founder Mode

#617

Post by kapad »

Both the examples cited here, Airbnb and Apple, have been through difficult times as a result of "manager mode failure".

In other words, "founder mode" worked after a failure of "manager mode".

Yet, would Apple even had continued to exist to this day had Steve not been fired?

From the essay, one thing is obvious, "founder mode" looks very different for a 20 person company than it does for a 2000 person company.

> 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. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. They'll even vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples of individual founders groping their way toward it.

The question that I have is, "is it possible for a founder to discover what 'founder mode' is for a 2000 person company, without going through some form of 'manager mode' as the company scaled from 20 to 2000"?

What would be even more interesting is comments from founders/employees of startups where "founder mode" persisted as the company scaled up from 20 employees. Were these companies successful? Do they continue operating successfully?

Re: Founder Mode

#618

Post by dbuser99 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #191

I'm not surprised this theme would be popular with founding CEOs but not really sure what the promised "Ground-breaking Management Mode you Won't Believe!" actually is. Is it take your favourite employees on a retreat, don't worry about the message this sends? Stop hiring mediocre middle managers and do... something else? Run a giant public company like a 20-person start-up, only don't? Delegate yet stay in control o…

100% agreed. If you read this piece from the lens of a SV executive or VC it makes perfect sense and serves the interests of all parties. Content? Who cares

Re: Founder Mode

#619

Post by bongodongobob »

madmask wrote: post #604
bongodongobob wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm talking about maximizing my dollar per mental processing unit ratio. I think that's kind of the gist of what being smart is in this thread. Get more money, reduce mental overhead, or both.

"I'm so much smarter than them."

"Well they have a yacht and 3 homes."

Who used their smartness better?

Re: Founder Mode

#620

Post by vinay_ys »

There's a fundamental point missing in this analysis. That is the difference in skin in the game and upside/downside game theory dynamics for people involved. An early "founder" by definition has a lot of upside and very little downside and have a lot of ownership. And hence they behave in a particular way. They are actually taking very little risk.

A late stage founder or a professional manager ceo has amassed stuff that they can lose more easily than stuff they potentially can gain. To continue to behave in the same way, they must be willing to take a lot of risk. And a lot of normal people don't want to take such risks.

Only really crazy people – be it a founder or a professional manager – will disregard game theory dynamics and work against their own apparent self-interest and take huge risks. And they tend to expect people around them to take similar huge risks along with them. We call them unreasonable people. And only really unreasonable people can make huge changes in society. This is by definition true because only such people will behave in an outlier manner, and if they do so with a huge amount of capital and power in their control, they can change societies in big ways. If we think that is working well, we celebrate them; and if we think it is horrible, we write cautionary tales about them. It is possible to have both perceptions to be held by different groups of people at the same time.

All the rest about hiring good people and letting them do etc is all just details of dynamics emanating from this unreasonable risk taking ability a person can manifest. I don't believe this can be turned into a playbook that can be taught in a management school. Management schools already teach how to take risks such that downside doesn't befall on the person who went to management school and instead falls on others. Everyone can subconsciously sense this about MBAs and hence the reaction they get. As companies become big and have a lot of external players with skin in the game (aka stakeholders) who are at a distance, they want these MBA types to manage that risk in such a way that it doesn't befall them. That's fundamentally very different from a founder who is not at a distance, but within. Still, founders also do the same when it is them vs their employees. In this aspect, it is all relative.

Post reply on HN