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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#631

Post by cutemonster »

nick3443 wrote: post #595
kamaal wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a different way of saying your managers need to be more engaged with the work they are doing and not just worry about abstract metrics like measuring progress by number of tickets they close or something as such. The thing is this is hard to pull off even for the actual founders. For starters its just hard, and tiring(and even pointless) to keep jumping over the ever increasing bar. Even more so when you…

Some people like contributing to successful projects though, and stay engaged even while maintaining work-life balance.

Yes definitely, I think so too.

And there's a difference between working with curing cancer or optimizing people wasting money in Candy Crush

Re: Founder Mode

#632

Post by taurath »

Crush your faking employees is the advice of the day. Founders are superheroes who can do no wrong and miss no context! Founders favoritism leading to being in an in-crowd never attracts faking employees, and the founders can famously always tell!

Never heard the nonsense idea that it’s good or frequent advice to step back and let people do their thing in a startup.

Re: Founder Mode

#633

Post by philwelch »

heed wrote: post #542
picafrost wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have made a poor choice by using the word "scales". I do not mean within the lifetime of the company -- that much is clear -- but scales across different startups, founders, and niches.

the way i'm thinking about it: could apple be the size it is today, in terms of market cap and or influence, being strictly ran in "founder mode"? i'm even skeptical steve jobs could have taken it here. that's not to say the goal should always be to scale or become as big as possible, but it's interesting to think about.

The actual scope of what Steve Jobs would be doing if he were still alive and serving as CEO today doesn’t seem like it would be much more than it was when he was alive though.

Re: Founder Mode

#634

Post by shiroiushi »

Chance-Device wrote: post #140
jodacola wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’d add to the other replies by saying that this isn’t just pure inefficiency - it’s the ability to try things and get them wrong without dying. Often several things. If one of them works out, maybe they justify the rest - just like investing in startups, ironically. Second, it’s also about redundancy, having more employees covers you from key man syndrome where your operations could be adversely affected by an emplo…

>it’s the ability to try things and get them wrong without dying. Often several things. If one of them works out, maybe they justify the rest

Yep, just look at 3M for instance. They were already an established chemical manufacturer, but they could afford to have some people spend their time investing adhesives. One of these was a total failure for the desired application (they wanted a strong adhesive for aerospace, they got a weak but reusable adhesive), but then they spent more time looking for applications for this, and now everyone and his dog uses 3M Post-It Notes.

Re: Founder Mode

#635

Post by darwinawardz »

joquarky wrote: post #596
portn0y wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That crucial thing was probably being lucky enough to be born 50 years ago before all the low hanging work we take for granted had been done.

I just want to write code. I don't want all the fuss anymore. It's all just such a mess now.

Write code peacefully,

No more fuss and endless mess,

Mind at ease, clear skies.

Re: Founder Mode

#636

Post by dilyevsky »

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…

The main takeaway of this piece is to be wary of the principal-agent problem but hey everyone already knew that, right? RIGHT?

Re: Founder Mode

#637

Post by DeborahWrites »

smeej wrote: post #554
DeborahWrites wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm belatedly learning this lesson (you'd think I'd have caught on earlier in my career) I very much want to stick to small young startups in future, but there's less demand for tech writers there.

You might have trouble finding opportunities to do this full-time anywhere, but if you could manage the documentation and knowledge base (especially if they're training AI bots internally and to support customers from it) for 3-4 client companies, you might be able to make that work. Good technical writing is especially important now. I guess you can try to train bots on the codebase itself, but unless that's pretty…

Yeah I freelanced for 4yrs before returning to employee-land in 2022. I think I'm going to go back to it eventually, but nervous in the current market.

Re: Founder Mode

#638

Post by alexey-salmin »

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…

> Is it take your favourite employees on a retreat, don't worry about the message this sends?

Well the message is "be excellent and next year you'll be there too". A failure to reward great employees out of fear of picking favorites is IMO one of the big problems of modern corporate management.

An impact of an outstanding employee is an order of magnitude bigger than that of an average one. You should reward people accordingly and openly. Here "accordingly" can literally mean "an order of magnitude bigger comp" and "openly" means you tell everyone this guy is rewarded because he works so well.

Instead what often happens is "here's a 20% raise but don't tell anybody so they don't think you're special. We're all equals here".

Re: Founder Mode

#639

Post by knallfrosch »

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…

If we just keep extrapolating from success stories, we'll inevitably run into survivorshop bias.

We can find a thousand companies where founders returned and made the company bigger, but what about those where the founder blocked growth and they never rose to prominence in the first place?

Re: Founder Mode

#640

Post by darwinawardz »

anal_reactor wrote: post #167
jodacola wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Maintaining a good structure is a cost on its own. A good analogy is how most many engineers think "if I spend two days writing documentation then I'll save one hour figuring out things later, resulting in net gain of negative fifteen work hours, great job".

Software "Engineers" thinking about creating documentation and actually creating documentation? Where? Usually I find "engineers" trying to use new unrelated tech to create more work for themselves and the company. Like adding the AWS stack to an Azure firm. Or the overzelous "perfectionist" starting with way too much abstraction to solve a simple problem. Real engineers get certificates, but software "engineers" range from over-glorified PowerApps developers all the way to the people who program medical devices and other life/death-grade solutions. The former never thinks about documentation and the latter has most all documentation provided or automatically generated.
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