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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#661

Post by vasilipupkin »

philwelch wrote: post #641
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 proc…

well, then founder mode is a meaningless thing because the essay seemed to suggest doing the opposite of "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"

Re: Founder Mode

#662

Post by vasilipupkin »

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #560

Sorry but am I the only one who got absolutely nothing from this. Firstly, I’ve never read more generalizations or stereotypes in a PG post. So manager mode is when a person sits at the top of a company, speaks to X direct reports and cares nothing about how they do their job. I’ve never seen anyone successfully manage like this. A skillful manager knows when to dig into ridiculously minute details and when not to. S…

agree

Re: Founder Mode

#664

Post by Invictus0 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #648
portn0y wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

portnoy is not the op

Re: Founder Mode

#665

Post by ryeguy_24 »

reagan83 wrote: post #439
dmurray wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on pg's other work, I would guess that previous drafts of this essay had concrete examples, but they were removed after deciding that including them would make the discussion all about those specifics. But in general I think it's clear: founder mode here means having strong opinions about all parts of the company. Maybe it's a technical founder telling salespeople what they should emphasise in their sales pitch…

I would argue that being a great operator (what he derides as manager mode) requires setting clear outputs and expectations from who you are delegating to. If your company turns to hell because you've delegated too hands off, that's a sign you aren't skilled enough at delegating. He calls this "founder mode" but this can be done by any highly skilled manager/operator.

Agree

Re: Founder Mode

#667

Post by blitzar »

bongodongobob wrote: post #486
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…

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

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

Skilfully timed when growing and succeeding. Unlucky timing when failing.

Re: Founder Mode

#668

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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…

Seems a particularly bad strategy for restaurants, seen countless restaurants that started as one location with queues down the block, to two locations then eventually they're at 5 or more and you go and the food is awful, like the ingredients might all be correct but the way its prepared just tastes gross compared to what it used to be because the process or the passion hasn't transferred correctly.

The odd one manages it but too many just end up with low talent, low invested staff slopping out bad food that has none of the implementation or taste that funded the expansion and the whole things slowly collapses in on itself.

Re: Founder Mode

#669

Post by martindbp »

crdrost wrote: post #351
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…

Slightly bigger challenges Netflix faces: • You have deals with N big media companies who each have their own restrictions on who can stream what from where. The list is constantly changing, so permissions to view media are locale-specific and revokable; you need a way to say “okay this person is not allowed any more to do that.” • Multiple-screen detection emphatically needs to be rock solid. Someone is going to unp…

The thing is, as a consumer I can't tell any difference between the technical solutions of Netflix vs Disney+, HBO Max or basically any other streaming service at this point, which proves that it's not actually that hard of a problem, at least today. I'm sure they were very innovative when they pioneered streaming but this is 2024. I'm sure their tech is better in multiple ways, but not in ways that actually lead to an edge, or is even noticeable to consumers. Now it's all about what content they have.

For comparison, I can tell a MacBook is better than a Windows laptop in 100 different ways. I can tell that the touch screen UI and self driving features in a Tesla is 15 years ahead a Toyota, but I cannot tell Netflix is better than its competitors.

Re: Founder Mode

#670

Post by scott_w »

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'…

> His footnote has a painful resonance: "I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it."

Oh I can totally picture this being used as an excuse for bad micromanagement! Unfortunately a lot of people are more interested in "doing the label" than developing a deep understanding of why they'd do something and how to apply it correctly.

And yes, I know I just described cargo-culting ;-)

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