721–730 of 772 posts
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"Crack", not "cracked". "Crack": adj., first-rate; excellent: a crack shot. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/crack "Cracked": no such meaning https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cracked
Urban Dictionary might be a better place for recent internet slang: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked
Without units on these "results" I have, literally, no measure to these implied figure(s) of merit being derived from a specific management style.
Additionally, depending on one's personal perspective and context, the same figures could be wonderful or horrible.
I will proffer, in a prior very successful (angel to S1) org, short (< 15min) skip-level meetings were the norm and it was considered "odd" to even schedule a meeting (outside of all-hands) with more than 2 other people.
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Do you prefer meetings or solving problems? Pretty sure I’d jump off a bridge after 2 weeks of meetings
I'm talking about maximizing my dollar per mental processing unit ratio. I think that's kind of the gist of what being smart is in this thread. Get more money, reduce mental overhead, or both. "I'm so much smarter than them." "Well they have a yacht and 3 homes." Who used their smartness better?
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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.
I struggle to see "founder mode" as something that scales. Is there not some self-selection bias occurring here, given the audience "included a lot of the most successful founders we've funded"? If a founder is exceptional and all of the other stars necessary for a startup to succeed have aligned, this may be a good approach. But then we are just back to the question YC has always tried to answer: what makes a founde…
why are we so fixated on scaling companies? there are certainly more companies that simply failed because they thought they needed to put in the organizational structure to be huge rather than doing what startups are supposed to do - be plucky and creative and work work hard and create something of unique value. that's enough to get you your 9 figure exit. maybe companies have lifecycles, and maybe blowing out an org…
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My first exposure to big company management was, ironically, at a startup. They hired their C-level executives from big companies. Those executives hired VPs and extra layers of management who were also from big companies. Very quickly we had a deep org chart where ICs could be 5 steps removed from the CEO even though they hadn’t decided exactly what product we were going to build. Everything was done by committee in…
Hiring is so scary. If you get the wrong people in the beginning, it can throw you into a wrong trajectory that's almost impossible to correct later.
When hires have no skin in the game besides their wage (which they're legally bound to receive until terminated, regardless of business outcomes), and have minimal material share in success, they are going to play different games to preserve that wage
If you want people to act like partners in the business, make them partners
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 mana…
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Then don't believe it. It's not some water tight argument he's making, it's not "law of physics" right.
That’s the point we’re making here: there is no argument.
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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.
Objectively, original post had little to no details in it to link it to any kind of typology. Sidenote: the fact that someone came up with another typology or classificator does not mean they know how to predict the outcomes in any way. It is the same exact MBTI style of pseudo-science which polluted tech and business world for decades. For someone urging others to read more, you’ve surely read something about the hi…
> Objectively, original post had little to no details in it to link it to any kind of typology.
And nobody suggested that it did.
> predict the outcomes in any way.
And nobody suggested that it did.
> MBTI > pseudo-science > hindsight bias
Ok, you do you.
I am beginning to think we could a learn a lot about organizational principles from complex minds. Our current organizational principles for companies, city-states, countries are very early in our exploration of these. Complex minds, on the other hands, are here after a multi-billion year journey. We are just learning more about them. One fundamental principle is that you have to be in touch with "reality". The more…
Also:
> Ideas are always matched up with bottom-up data.
That does not hold, I can have a myriad of ideas not grounded in reality