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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#691

Post by mlindner »

malfist wrote: post #509
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'…

Your Dad founded Celestron? That's crazy. I use an edgehd for all my astrophotography. It's a damn fine instrument.

The current Celstron is owned by a Taiwanese company and just acts as a US distributor for that company so I wouldn't say its the same company anymore.

Re: Founder Mode

#692

Post by ai4ever »

> For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered > the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people > highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do > this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be.

> It could make a big company feel like a startup

Nope, not true in my book. I would not like to be in any company that "selects" a small group of elites to a hawaii or las-vegas "retreat". then, said elites would propagate their new-found retreat wisdom from their cult-leader down to the plebs.

Re: Founder Mode

#693

Post by NhanH »

ai4ever wrote: post #692

> For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered > the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people > highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do > this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. > It could make a big company feel like a startup Nope, not true in my book. I would not like to be in…

Then you would not be one of the most important people in that company anyway.

Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with that, but commitment goes both way.

Re: Founder Mode

#694

Post by halfcat »

narnarpapadaddy wrote: post #680
thntk wrote: post #673

It's not founder mode or manager mode. I think it is just about effective management. When starting up, the founder needs to (1) know what should be done, (2) be able to do it themself, and (3) do it and confirmed it's done. When scaling up, the founder still needs to (1) know what should be done, (2') know who are able to do it, and (3') arrange for those to do it and confirm it's done. What is called manager mode i…

I agree with this. In my experience, if your "good people" are running your business into the ground, you just didn't hire good people. The challenge is that hiring "good people" is incredibly difficult. It's also actually fairly hard to get released once onboard. If the company is in the black, even if growth is far below where a founder or investor wants to be, stakeholders are reluctant to make changes. Baseball r…

> After that, let them do their job and move on

Yes, for the most part. But also: trust but verify

Figure out how much time you can spend on re-verifying, and do it in a random sampling basis. This will look different depending on the roles, but it’s whatever you need to do to verify, first-hand, the job is still being done correctly.

This will likely be a very small percent of your time, but the key is that it needs to be non-zero.

Re: Founder Mode

#695

Post by mempko »

regularfry wrote: post #686
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 becom…

What I'm disappointed by is that in the hundreds of years of capitalism, there has been little or no scientific research that looks at what structures create companies that have the desirable attributes we want. The fact that Paul Graham is now coining 'founder mode' without formulating any theory and approach to test what works (you would think VCs would be a group capable of doing this research) is disappointing.

The lack of any scientific rigor means we have founders floundering when building companies. For now we can just point to individual cases like Steve Jobs or Valve and have to guess why what they did worked. We are in the snake oil period of corporate governance.

Re: Founder Mode

#696

Post by stonethrowaway »

> Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.

This is the Chesterton‘a Fence applied to running companies. It’s somewhat dark-comedy counterpart is the “always has been” meme.

You also have to take into account the % of bad actors involved online and elsewhere who want to misdirect you, misguide you, and ultimately to make you fail. Healthy skepticism and distrust helps a lot.

Re: Founder Mode

#697

Post by miltava »

Does anyone know if the presentation is public? I’d love to get a deeper understanding about what the founder mode is.

I agree with Graham about the management mode described being a very bad (trusting “professional” managers and being completely hands off from their responsibilities). And being a founder myself who saw it working first hand at the acquirer of my last company, I see that management in this mode is not worried about the company long term success.

But I’m not sure how founder mode is new or how this is different from what Andy grove suggests in High output management. Among other things, he says that the supervisor should be more or less hands on depending on the “task relevant maturity” of her direct reports.

Maybe by seeing the presentation it would be clearer.

Thanks

Re: Founder Mode

#698

Post by stonethrowaway »

tcgv wrote: post #688

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…

> Eventually, they left, and we realized that while they had been successful in large organizations with thousands of employees, […]

You don’t really believe that, do you?

Re: Founder Mode

#699

Post by tcgv »

stonethrowaway wrote: post #698
tcgv wrote: post #688

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…

> Eventually, they left, and we realized that while they had been successful in large organizations with thousands of employees, […] You don’t really believe that, do you?

You're right that PG's piece suggests they probably weren't as successful or impactful in their previous roles as their references claimed. But we can never be entirely sure. I also don't dismiss our responsibility as co-founders for the decision and how it was implemented under our leadership.

Re: Founder Mode

#700

Post by jedberg »

I've spoken to founders about this before, and pointed out something that not a single one of them had thought of until I pointed it out:

The founder of the company stands to make generationally life changing money, the people they hire do not.

Founder mode works because the founders are willing to spend every waking moment on work. They have time to get into the details of everything. And it's worth it for them because success could mean billions. It could mean they are set for life, as is the next 10 or 100 generations of their family.

Steve Jobs -- Billionaire. Brian Chesky -- also a billionaire. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang . Basically anyone you would name as successfully running a company in founder mode is most likely a billionaire. It's worth it to them to scarface everything to spend every waking moment on work.

But the people they hire don't have that incentive. Especially not anymore, with the way VCs are getting better at extracting value from companies. Exits for early employees aren't nearly life changing as they used to be, and exits for later employees at the stages we are talking about here are even worse.

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