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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#751

Post by fsndz »

xandrius wrote: post #564
fsndz wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frankly don't know why people keep using Airbnb now. It's costly, and the service is worse than a hotel. My worst vacations have happened in Airbnbs. Even for group vacations with friends, we now choose hotels. The good Airbnbs seem to be only the luxury or high-end types, suitable for very high-income or rich people.

It really depends on the country and what you're looking for. In your description, you might be doing it only for a short holiday but when you travel long term, living only in hotels is truly awful. Airbnb is the only way to consistently be able to rent a full place without having to go through traditional renting agencies which require oh so much paperwork, even for just a month. The alternative is finding privates…

I get it. But how many people travel long-term every year? I usually get 4 weeks and split that between 2-3 locations, both in and out of the country. And I don't necessarily want to cook a lot on vacation (I guess I am not alone?), so the kitchen argument doesn't really work for me. But I guess I'm not the ideal customer for Airbnb. It's just that recently, almost all the feedback I get from people using Airbnbs is negative. Maybe Airbnb has just become something of a cultural phenomenon, so it will continue to exist because of that and for serving a narrow base of medium- to high-income people who travel for long stays and want a home during their trips for various reasons.

Re: Founder Mode

#752

Post by borroka »

itishappy wrote: post #748
borroka wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It is mostly nonsense built on top of nonsense, I believe. To be honest, the miracles of Jesus, as described in the Gospels, sound more reasonable.

Re: Founder Mode

#753

Post by itishappy »

borroka wrote: post #752
itishappy wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Naming is the origin of all particular things, but the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao"-- It is mostly nonsense built on top of nonsense, I believe. To be honest, the miracles of Jesus, as described in the Gospels, sound more reasonable.

Suit yourself. I personally find it quite wise and generally applicable, and was able to intuit the exact response I was hoping for despite never having completed a read-through of the Tao. (In the first section, no less!)

I find the Tao has a knack for describing my atheist worldview in exactly the way the Bible doesn't. "Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him."

Re: Founder Mode

#754

Post by philwelch »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #743
philwelch wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Some things are just complex and inherently outside of the CEOs competency.

That’s the mentality that gets you with a Boeing CEO who doesn’t know that airplanes need redundancies. I think you can expect more from a great founder. In particular, people who have worked with Jeff Bezos have said that he is incredibly smart and broadly competent.

Probably more important is an intrinsic curiosity. Jeff Bezos seems like the kind of guy who really enjoys learning about aerospace manufacturing techniques or rocket engine design or distributed systems or supply chain management. If you’re smart and intrinsically curious, these deep dives aren’t really that much time and effort. If you’re the stereotypical MBA midwit, it’s outside your comfort zone and what you enjoy and it will be an ordeal.

> They have to be able to build a management team of properly incentivized highly skilled professionals.

It helps to remain involved with the details until you can tell who’s trustworthy. Once you have other trustworthy people to help you manage the details, of course you can delegate more and more of the work to them, and enlist them to help you with the deep dives.

> 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.

Right. The flip side is that Jeff Bezos delegated a lot of the day to day operational management to the S-team so he had more time for deep dives. In other words, rather than focusing his attention broadly on the top level big picture, he scanned for problems and when he found one and spent his attention narrowly examining them one by one. Which, again, sounds like exactly what a curious person would do! Spending all of your time focusing on the exact same high-level overview over and over again sounds really boring because you never get to learn anything, and it’s the learning that’s the fun part.

Re: Founder Mode

#755

Post by vasilipupkin »

philwelch wrote: post #754
vasilipupkin wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Some things are just complex and inherently outside of the CEOs competency. That’s the mentality that gets you with a Boeing CEO who doesn’t know that airplanes need redundancies. I think you can expect more from a great founder. In particular, people who have worked with Jeff Bezos have said that he is incredibly smart and broadly competent. Probably more important is an intrinsic curiosity. Jeff Bezos seems like…

Some CEOs are bad at running companies and some founders are also bad. Boeing example is weak for that reason. I just don't think this statement is empirically true at all "if you’re smart and intrinsically curious, these deep dives aren’t really that much time and effort"

Re: Founder Mode

#756

Post by y04nn »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #470
thelastgallon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once a company becomes successful, it attracts the second kind of people in Iron Law of Bureaucracy. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

Third, there's people who only value themselves and use the organization as an excuse.

This is probably the majority of cases, but it is beneficial to the organization, similarly to the Adams's Smith invisible hand.

Re: Founder Mode

#757

Post by ChaitanyaSai »

incognito124 wrote: post #730
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #11

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…

What is a complex mind? Do you mean a brain? 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

Complex minds, yes brains

> Ideas are always matched up with bottom-up data. >>That does not hold, I can have a myriad of ideas not grounded in reality

You are right. What I should clarify is that there is a process that always matches it up. You can have all those creative ideas, but you "know" at the same time that those are not real. You (except in some cases/pharmacologically altered) are not hallucinating like current LLMs (and some large orgs) do

Re: Founder Mode

#758

Post by gkiely »

RichardKain wrote: post #234

I think the vast majority of businesses are run in "Founder Mode," and maybe the majority of start ups. That's why they don't make it. The books about delegation from the HBS crowd are in some respects a reaction to that default mode. Chesky and Jobs are obviously managerial outliers for their extreme accomplishment. Anytime one cites Jobs as a guru I'm reminded of an evaluation Bill Gates made about Jobs, to the eff…

Some of his recent talks cover it: https://youtu.be/aZ-BjJZxNoA?si=yPYH71a76Mr1RWLr

https://youtu.be/4ef0juAMqoE?si=fya1OCfUUR4n_gd1

Re: Founder Mode

#759

Post by bboygravity »

TrackerFF wrote: post #61
bboygravity wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does (rarely) happen though. Example: how Ryan Cohen (self-made billionaire founder of Chewy) got himself into a different established company. He bought enough shares for himself, took over the board of an established company and put in some of his own, replaced the shitty CEO (by himself) and turned an established declining company around to profitability and possibly long-term growth.

Let's ignore the fact that GameStop is a meme-stock. Has Cohen actually improved the company? Revenue keeps falling, year by year, and other than having more cash on hand - not much seems to be changing. Seems to me that every positive thing that happened to the company, can be credited to the pumping of the stock. The fundamentals haven't changed much.

Let's not ignore the fact that you call GameStop a meme-stock.

Please explain how it is a meme-stock in 2024 and what that even means? What's the definition? Like how is GameStop not a "real" stock or "real" company?

It has 4 billion cash on hand (for 10B market cap company), no debt and is profitable. It had NONE of that before RC bought himself in. How is that a declining company? Or how does this fall under "not much seems to be changing"?

Also "every positive thing that happened to the company, can be credited to the pumping of the stock" makes no sense at all. 3 of the 4 billion cash on hand was from stock offerings that happened this year. On 0 news. Every single spike in the past 3 years was on 0 news. You can keep blaming "pumping", that's fine. But you'll have to specify who's doing the pumping and why to make that statement have any meaning. It's unlikely that household investors are doing 100+ million volume A DAY in a company that issued around 300 million stocks total (referring to the 300%+ spike days this year on 0 news).

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