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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#701

Post by cloche »

cj wrote: post #330
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…

As our company scaled, 7-figure ARR, the common refrain was it was time we hire a VP of Sales to help make our sales process "repeatable, scalable, blah blah". So we tried twice over 3 years with 2 different VP's. Both paid $300-400k and sourced through recruiters who charged $75k in recruiter fees. So we were getting what any VC would consider cream of the crop VP of Sales. Yet both of them failed spectacularly. We…

Really interesting response. So if hiring from the outside isn't ideal and promoting from within isn't ideal, what is the solution? Going back 3 years ago, what would you have done instead?

Re: Founder Mode

#702

Post by swiftcoder »

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…

Bezos delegated, but he also followed up aggressively, and the whole company reporting structure was designed to enable that.

When I worked there, Bezos held a weekly S-team meeting where the execs all came fully briefed to answer any questions about ongoing issues in their departments. That flowed on down the chain: Andy Jassy had an AWS-wide meeting the day before to gather the relevant data from each of his teams, and that meant that every major AWS team had an internal rollup meeting on Mondays to prepare for Jassy's meeting...

Most of the question mark emails seemed to target more specific issues (mostly customer pain points). The fixers were more for big organisational or tech problems. If your division was significantly behind schedule on a product launch, or your production system had significant failure rates, you were liable to have a Senior Principal engineer and/or a new VP airdropped into your org, with significant leeway to get shit done

Re: Founder Mode

#703

Post by swiftcoder »

philwelch wrote: post #684
vasilipupkin wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, the key bit here is that you would remain under the microscope till you could demonstrate to the entire management chain that the problem was actually solved - and with the Bezos question mark came an implicit guarantee that the resources/authority to actually solve issue would be made available.

Re: Founder Mode

#704

Post by vasilipupkin »

swiftcoder wrote: post #703
philwelch wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, the key bit here is that you would remain under the microscope till you could demonstrate to the entire management chain that the problem was actually solved - and with the Bezos question mark came an implicit guarantee that the resources/authority to actually solve issue would be made available.

all this implies trust in the management team, right? to tell Bezos that it's really solved. The opposite of what the essay is arguing, that these managers tend to be fakers and can't be trusted.

Re: Founder Mode

#705

Post by thntk »

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…

Have you tried hiring or rotating internal people just for solving specific (management) tasks? It is like the "just-in-time" style in Japanese corps.

Re: Founder Mode

#706

Post by swiftcoder »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #704
swiftcoder wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the key bit here is that you would remain under the microscope till you could demonstrate to the entire management chain that the problem was actually solved - and with the Bezos question mark came an implicit guarantee that the resources/authority to actually solve issue would be made available.

all this implies trust in the management team, right? to tell Bezos that it's really solved. The opposite of what the essay is arguing, that these managers tend to be fakers and can't be trusted.

Indeed. And I think the essay comes with the implicit assumption that founders are bad at spotting snake-oil execs (which may be warranted in general, but isn't in Amazon's case)

Re: Founder Mode

#707

Post by cloche »

bradleyjg wrote: post #538
Flop7331 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is one of those cases where there's really very little way of knowing what really worked and what didn't. It's like a sports team: you can make ALL the right managerial choices, but still fail due to chance and factors outside your control. At best there are some reasonably good heuristics.

On the flip side you can hire Michael Jordan and screw everything else up and still win. Then go on to write a business book that’s completely misleading because you never realize that you did only one thing right, and that was enough.

> On the flip side you can hire Michael Jordan and screw everything else up and still win

Unless your company is a baseball team

Re: Founder Mode

#708

Post by dogman144 »

Can summarize this as once the standard MBAs come in, tech companies 50/50 go down the drain. They’ll often survive and return shareholder value, but won’t be a place worth working beyond rest and vest.

Or, they are where to play the game with some other sociopaths who know the silly rules are silly but lead to great TC if you play (and somewhere in the background there’s a company/product). Rinse/repeat because the median HBS grad needs a job somewhere!

I am surprised it apparently took a groundbreaking speech for a very experienced VC to grok this.

Re: Founder Mode

#709

Post by cj »

cloche wrote: post #701
cj wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As our company scaled, 7-figure ARR, the common refrain was it was time we hire a VP of Sales to help make our sales process "repeatable, scalable, blah blah". So we tried twice over 3 years with 2 different VP's. Both paid $300-400k and sourced through recruiters who charged $75k in recruiter fees. So we were getting what any VC would consider cream of the crop VP of Sales. Yet both of them failed spectacularly. We…

Really interesting response. So if hiring from the outside isn't ideal and promoting from within isn't ideal, what is the solution? Going back 3 years ago, what would you have done instead?

What ended up working was hiring a Sales Manager instead of a VP.

The lesser title attracted candidates who were happy to take direction from founders, and the founder still stays in the “head of sales” seat.

Once the sales manager is ramped up, grow as much as possible then bring a VP to oversee it all, but with a larger team already in place it will be harder for them to mess up what’s working.

Re: Founder Mode

#710

Post by __turbobrew__ »

mihaic wrote: post #527
codingdave wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> employees simply doing what was best for them No leader should expect anything different from their people. It is your job to align the incentives so that what is best for the employee is to do those things that are best for the company. If you are relying on people to do what is not best for them out of loyalty to a corporation/startup/vision, you do not have an accurate pulse of the modern work force. And yes, wh…

I'm sure you mean well, but this is exactly the the non-founder response I'm talking about. And maybe things were different 20 years ago, I don't know. There's always something better I could have done as the person in charge, obviously. I've done a lot of reflection and self-critique, please believe me, and I realized I've made a lot of mistakes, from which the situations could have been recovered though. Putting my…

I can be incentivized by money, but it has to be in the 7 figure range. The reality is that tech workers with a little bit of work can clear 400k/yr at BigCo with much higher job security and much lower variance than any startup.

Why would I grind at a startup where the best case scenario I am getting a payout I could get at FAANG without any of the risk?

I have been through a successful exit as a SWE and you can be sure that the founders did everything in their power to maximize their own payout and minimize my payout. In a company of 40 the founders got a payout of 100x any other individual at the company, even those who were there early on and stayed until the exit. I got a (taxable) payout of ~300k and the founders got 40mil. The money was life changing for the founders, but for everyone else it was just a nice bonus.

Now I just work at BigCo and make 400k/yr, every year.

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