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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#641

Post by philwelch »

swiftcoder wrote: post #621

I feel like Amazon is a great case in point - Bezos exercised direct command-and-control of all major initiatives for his entire tenure at the helm. Delegation was obviously in play, but responsibility was never diffused. At the end of the day, there was a direct chain of responsibility from you all the way up to Bezos, and he wouldn't hesitate to send one of his personal fixers in if things were going off the rails…

That’s an interesting observation because Jeff Bezos also seemed to delegate a lot. It seemed that the S-team (Amazon’s term for their top executives) basically ran the entire company, which admittedly frees up a lot of Jeff’s time to focus on whatever seems most important to him.

I also hadn’t heard about him sending fixers in; was that an escalation to sending a question mark email or was it part of the normal process? I know you’re probably aware of this but for other people reading this discussion I feel I should elaborate: if some problem at Amazon, usually customer-facing and often a complaint from an actual customer, landed in Jeff’s inbox and caught his attention, he would forward the email to whoever was responsible for the situation, adding “?” as his sole commentary. I think he just forwarded the email to one of the S-team and it would get passed down the org chart until it reached the relevant manager but everyone in that chain would keep the issue at front of mind until it was resolved. And if you were the manager that actually owned the issue, it was now your top priority. The expectation was that not only would you address the customer’s immediate problem but that you would root-cause the problem and address it as categorically as possible.

Come to think of it, maybe this is a good example of founder mode.

Re: Founder Mode

#642

Post by shiroiushi »

germinalphrase wrote: post #434
globalise83 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a purely financial level, making their company the most important thing in their life for a period of maybe 5-10 years means that they have a good chance at not having to work at all for the rest of their life. Doing 5-10 years of overtime for someone else falls quite short of that in most cases.

“… they have a good chance at not having to work at all for the rest of their life.” We must have different expectations for the failure rate of startups.

Startup founders are probably never pessimists.

Re: Founder Mode

#643

Post by shiroiushi »

bpmooch wrote: post #414
kaplun wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A founder lives their company as the most important thing in their life, it's an extension of their life and they live and breath the company. A manager instead is being given a responsibility and will try their best to fulfill the role. A founder will never rest if they know there's an issue to be solved in the company, while the manager has a life and know they can move forward in case. A founder will not be intimi…

> A founder lives their company as the most important thing in their life, it's an extension of their life and they live and breath the company. i generally consider myself a hard worker and i have done plenty of overtime in my career. i would feel pity for anyone who felt this way about any company, unless they were literally curing cancer or giving us infinite energy. yuck

You're obviously not a startup founder with an attitude like that. And it's OK: being a founder of a startup really isn't for everyone, for good reason. Most startups fail, remember. And like you, most people don't want to dedicate their life to a company. I wouldn't want to be a founder either: I like having a life outside work. Founders are different; their company is their "baby" so they have an entirely different outlook to work than the rest of us.

Re: Founder Mode

#644

Post by onursurme »

zX41ZdbW wrote: post #607
onursurme wrote: post #226

Do you have a link for the full talk?

This? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product...

No, it must be August 2024, because paulgraham.com says "At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk..." and the blog post is dated as September 2024.

Re: Founder Mode

#645

Post by solidninja »

kamaal wrote: post #583
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'…

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…

It comes back to the work itself being interesting and whether you actually care about the field that you are working in. I would not like to live in a world where you have to put in 80 hours a week to get a decent salary as an expert. It's true that there are a lot of people who got into the industry just because of the comp though :(

Re: Founder Mode

#646

Post by kragen »

detourdog wrote: post #320
kragen wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mostly agree with your first filter, but your second filter excludes all superstars, turning your comment into nonsense as a whole whether 'an inconsistent superstar is not as good as an individual with a consistently fresh solution' depends on the situation. if you're in a situation where that's true, you're not looking for superstars, and you shouldn't try to intrude your decision criteria into discussions about…

I disagree superstars are human one should expect failures from humans.

i can't parse that

Re: Founder Mode

#647

Post by itsoktocry »

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'…

There's nothing unique about Startups in this sense.

What we are talking about is people who care about the success of the business and pleasing customers, versus people who are optimizing for "corporate success" (ladder climbing).

You can find both types of people everywhere, at all levels. So it really is about "hire the best people". You just have to have the right measure of "best".

Re: Founder Mode

#648

Post by itsoktocry »

portn0y wrote: post #488
bongodongobob wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did they do that was so bad that it cost him 3 locations?

Probably load up on financing to expand. Expansion floundered and they had to unload unprofitable and profitable locations to cover the debt.

Why didn't he have the ability to foresee the idea was bad?

Re: Founder Mode

#649

Post by luigi23 »

taurath wrote: post #632

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.

Strawman comment

Re: Founder Mode

#650

Post by peter_vukovic »

For every example of a company that bounced back due to "founder mode", there is an opposite example of a company saved by "manager mode".

The modes don't exist. You either figure out how to effectively manage the company in front of you, or you don't.

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