Founder Mode • Hacker News Board

Re: Founder Mode

#741

Post by pontifier » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 10:07 AM UTC

If I had to articulate why I feel the need to do certain things my way, against all advice by people who think they know a better way, I'd boil it down like this: There are things that I see as important to the core idea of the company that nobody else understands. If they did, they'd have seen the need for the company and done it themselves. Its more than just a vision. It's like a hologram. Anyone can see the image, but the founders see the fringe pattern.

I see why all the hidden elements need to be just so or the whole thing is meaningless.

Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but it's rare to find someone that truly gets things rather than just going through the motions. If you do, its likely they have their own idea.

It feels like every decision I make gets resistance from people who live their lives in mediocrity. If they really knew the best course of action they'd be the one in charge and I'd be the one trying to give the mediocre advice.

I'm so tired, but nobody else is going to do it right.

Re: Founder Mode

#742

Post by thntk » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 11:11 AM UTC

tcgv wrote: post #715

thntk wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We haven't tried that yet, but it's an interesting idea. I'm the technical co-founder. Under me, we have three squads. Two of them are led by managers who were promoted internally from individual contributor roles. These managers still do some hands-on coding occasionally when needed, but they primarily focus on delegating tasks to their teams as much as possible. The third squad has a manager without coding responsi…

It sounds like your startup is doing great, good luck.

Re: Founder Mode

#743

Post by vasilipupkin » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 12:14 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #739

vasilipupkin wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. There is no way CEO of a huge company like Amazon can really know every detail. At some point he’s gonna just have to trust someone at the company.

You’d be surprised—the founder of a huge company like Amazon is likely to be an outlier in terms of how many details he actually can know. The more you learn about the biographies of exceptional leaders the more you realize that many of them actually had a hard, concrete understanding of what their organizations did that often exceeded that of the people who actually did the work on a day to day basis. But part of be…

I disagree. Some things are just complex and inherently outside of the CEOs competency. They have to be able to build a management team of properly incentivized highly skilled professionals. Time in the day is limited, if you are delving into details on X and Y, that means at that same time you are not spending time on Z.

Re: Founder Mode

#744

Post by hnfong » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 12:18 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #332

trunnell wrote: post #246

Counter-example: Reed Hastings, co-founder and the CEO of Netflix for 22 years, famously did the opposite of what pg is saying. Reed insisted on a particular style of employee freedom & responsibility that IMO set the benchmark for innovating year after year and avoiding micro-managers, even as it scaled up past 2000 engineers. This story still has not been fully told. Reed was closely involved but perhaps the opposi…

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…

I've always thought the myth came from the fact/rumor that Netflix paid above FAA(N?)G rates for engineers...

Re: Founder Mode

#745

Post by swiftcoder » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 12:21 PM UTC

vasilipupkin wrote: post #731

philwelch wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it doesn't sound like his style was to "trust the management team to tell him that it's really solved". It sounds like his style was to "dive deep" and make sure the problem was solved. If you put in the work and understand the business deeply enough, nobody's going to successfully bullshit you.

Come on. There is no way CEO of a huge company like Amazon can really know every detail. At some point he’s gonna just have to trust someone at the company.

You don't have to know every detail. You just need a list of things to follow up on, and be somewhat decent at identifying when a subordinate is feeding you a line of bullshit

Re: Founder Mode

#746

Post by scott_w » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 12:54 PM UTC

knallfrosch wrote: post #639

trunnell wrote: post #246

Counter-example: Reed Hastings, co-founder and the CEO of Netflix for 22 years, famously did the opposite of what pg is saying. Reed insisted on a particular style of employee freedom & responsibility that IMO set the benchmark for innovating year after year and avoiding micro-managers, even as it scaled up past 2000 engineers. This story still has not been fully told. Reed was closely involved but perhaps the opposi…

If we just keep extrapolating from success stories, we'll inevitably run into survivorshop bias. We can find a thousand companies where founders returned and made the company bigger, but what about those where the founder blocked growth and they never rose to prominence in the first place?

Honestly, it's really tough to pick it out from such a high level. You can also see countless companies that succeed in spite of the fact they're doing the wrong things, if you follow the business success playbooks.

Businesses and markets are really complex and it's difficult to look at individual businesses or decisions and make definitive claims. It takes a lot of time and research to pick apart the different factors that correlate most strongly with success.

Does that mean PG's observations are worthless? Not at all. Between today and those research papers being written, we need to make decisions based on observations that we or others make. Some of those things will be helpful, some will be harmful and some will be irrelevant. We do the best we can with the information we have access to.

Re: Founder Mode

#747

Post by bobosha » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 1:05 PM UTC

In my experience, "founder mode" is when founders intuitively understand what is best for their business and steer clear of cargo cult practices. All too often, professional management falls back on formulaic methods that end up driving businesses into the ground. This post [1] is a great case study of one such instance.

[1] https://healthio.notion.site/How-Cargo-Cult-Thinking-Nearly-...

Re: Founder Mode

#748

Post by itishappy » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

borroka wrote: post #716

cwillu wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The tao that can be named is not the eternal tao"

It is funny that we take such nonsense seriously when the inventor of radio and the brilliant people who built the telecommunications system on top of it said: "try this thing, you can call your mother who lives in Australia from the United States". No, "the waves that can be used are not the eternal waves," they built a miracle and made people use it.

Naming is the origin of all particular things, but the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.

The photon came after, for instance.

Re: Founder Mode

#749

Post by malfist » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 2:23 PM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #691

malfist wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For some reason I was thinking Celestron was the one of the few not owned by Synta.

Re: Founder Mode

#750

Post by sanderjd » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

koliber wrote: post #623

It’s surprising that this is surprising. Every conversation loses information. Something is always lost in translation, even among excellent communicators. If you only rely on your direct reports to get information about your organization you will be flying blind. This will happen in situations where everyone has the purest intentions. Add on top politics and personal interests and the problem compounds. Here are a f…

Yeah this is interesting. I've always thought this walking around thing that some managers think they should do is pretty useless and even toxic. All you can see when "walking around" a knowledge worker office is what's on peoples' screens at that moment and whether they are typing. But this is useless information, and it's actively counterproductive for people to be self conscious about what's on their screen when people are walking around behind them.

But I like what you've proposed here as a virtual "walking around" a lot more! The kinds of things you're describing are a lot closer to the pulse of what's going on than seeing what's on random peoples' screens at random times.