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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#681

Post by vinay_ys »

cutemonster wrote: post #626
vinay_ys wrote: post #620

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…

I think you're forgetting this: "often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground." That's not low risk, that's higher risk. Letting the founders continue in Founder Mode can be both lower risk, and higher expected value, at the same time. > hiring good people and letting them do etc is all just details of dynamics emanating from this unreasonable risk taking ability…

> That's not low risk, that's higher risk. Letting the founders continue in Founder Mode can be both lower risk, and higher expected value, at the same time.

It depends on how the founder and their investors perceive risk. If they have the risk appetite to stay in founder mode at scale, even when they have a lot to lose, then they do. But most don't. That's my point. And so, they take the advise to derisk for themselves – they take some money off the table, they hire professional managers and delegate, they take their new found time and money and put it elsewhere.

Re: Founder Mode

#682

Post by kamaal »

solidninja wrote: post #645
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…

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 :(

>>It's true that there are a lot of people who got into the industry just because of the comp though :(

Lots of people are just tuned out. And just don't care. With or without the comp.

>>It comes back to the work itself being interesting and whether you actually care about the field that you are working in.

There was this HR in a company here in India. She spoke at length about what attracted people to IT. Basically the employees wanted the realisation that they were creating tremendous value for the company, at the same time earning very high, and of course wanted work life balance. It was more or less impossible to achieve this. There aren't even enough projects of substance to make this happen. At least not for everyone, all the time. The net result was people tuned out, or just don't involve themselves enough at their work, or associate the outcome of their work at personal level.

Another additional factor how quickly the product/projects get shut down/eol in our industry. There are not many things that last for years that you take pride building them.

Re: Founder Mode

#683

Post by mlindner »

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…

I find myself thinking more and more that Bryan Cantrill, despite him highly disliking Elon Musk, seems to agree with him regularly on many things including things such a this.

Re: Founder Mode

#684

Post by philwelch »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #661
philwelch wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

My understanding is that Jeff Bezos would remain involved in the followup

Re: Founder Mode

#685

Post by whizzter »

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'…

I think it's much more simple than having a separate manager or founder mode..

Good founders will want to learn or at least understand all tasks that sets their business apart without becoming micro-managers, when their become overburdened by details in certain areas the default action should be to delegate to someone they _trust_ with doing in the area rather than just hiring someone with a CV and charisma that _implies_ that they are good at handling that area.

This probably often works well for most founders initially when they only need to delegate practical tasks that they know how to measure directly.

However once the money stakes, and most importantly number of people grow. The tasks needed to be delegated are managerial rather than practical so the founders become faced with another kind of delegation that they have less proficiency in.

This is probably where things go awry, at least some of their early promotions or delegations probably didn't thrive as managers, faced with failures they start seeking out managers from the managerial class from the outside rather than risk finding the right people with domain knowledge to promote.

Re: Founder Mode

#686

Post by regularfry »

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'…

I don't see anything distinct enough to call "founder mode" here. It's just one (very important, but small) sub-facet of Ron Westrum's organisational typology. That specific behaviour, of a top-of-the-tree authority figure getting involved in the weeds, is just one behaviour he calls out as characterising generative cultures, but there are others: an eagerness to find mistakes is another important one.

This has become more popularised by DORA, but Westrum divides cultures into "Generative", "Bureaucratic", and "Pathological". Someone who finds a mistake is praised in a generative culture, ignored in a bureaucratic one, and blamed in a pathological one. The conventional "management"-type detail-hiding hierarchy would be absolutely stereotypical of bureaucratic or pathological cultures depending on the goal.

From that point of view I think this is better understood than you'd think, but possibly not well communicated.

Re: Founder Mode

#687

Post by regularfry »

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…

It's a numbers game. If you're in a position where you suddenly have to hire for the top of a tree, then you're virtually certain to have a hiring pool of people who have become successful acting as though the sort of culture you want to sustain is impossible and can't exist.

There's a lot of management "common sense" which is oriented to that 20% solution and denying that 80% is even possible. I don't think the framework is impossible to learn as much as that the lessons needed are culturally out of alignment with how the professional management class speak. MBA courses have a lot to answer for.

Re: Founder Mode

#688

Post by tcgv »

Over my ten-year journey as a co-founder, my partners and I have twice decided to hire "expert" senior managers with proven track records from renowned companies to help us grow. Both times, this not only resulted in a waste of money due to their high compensation but also a waste of time and energy. Onboarding and managing them took significant effort, yet they failed to deliver meaningful results. Eventually, they left, and we realized that while they had been successful in large organizations with thousands of employees, our smaller, 100-person company may lacked the structure they were used to for delivering results.

We concluded that they were high-level managers with little hands-on experience, accustomed to having large teams to execute their plans. They were often slow to recognize their lack of progress, or didn’t recognize it at all, and frequently spoke about the need for more "strategic" actions when what we really needed was to focus on executing key priorities.

So I related to PG's post.

Re: Founder Mode

#689

Post by regularfry »

jschveibinz wrote: post #674

Even though PG is purposely being a bit circumspective with respect to the characteristics of founder mode, I believe that it is safe to say that founders, rather than managers, are more likely to be: - emotionally involved - visionary or pioneering - optimistic - gritty or determined - domain experienced - competitive - strong negotiators - strong communicators - self-starting (priority setters) - intuitive, and - s…

Whether or not that group of characteristics is true, there is another factor which is that a founder doesn't have to convince anyone of their own management style to get hired. They don't have to play a part, to pretend to buy into professional management class cultural markers. As a result they'll end up in a position that they would never be hired into because their ideas would sound wrong to the people doing the hiring.

Re: Founder Mode

#690

Post by regularfry »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #294

This whole article is written around one key sentence: > There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is. But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5 more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete. And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like…

It's a "generative culture" according to Westrum's organisational typology. Recognising it as that makes it clear that a) there is actually something to this, b) PG's being less novel here than he thinks, and c) everyone here needs to read more.
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