Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I would think sarcasm is inappropriate in public discourse.
Ah, my mistake.
Founder Mode
761–770 of 772 posts
Re: Founder Mode
#762A 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…
This happened with a local burger chain - once they grew beyond 3 locations that were relatively close together, the quality at all of them dropped significantly. My guess is that the founder put managers in place who weren't as passionate and went more hands-off, leading to the the slide in quality.
Re: Founder Mode
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
For me I only hear great things. I never Airbnb'd in the US but literally everywhere else and I personally just had amazing experiences.
If a country doesn't seem to have good Airbnb options, booking.com can provide similar-ish experiences (kitchen + homey vibes).
And if I had kids, I think Airbnb/homestay would make even more sense to me than hotels.
Together with that, I really don't like having to "fight off" cleaners wanting to clean my room every single day. Even putting up the do not disturb sign doesn't always work.
Re: Founder Mode
#764It’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…
There is even a name for it: Gemba Walk, a LEAN practice. Management self-help guru Tom Peters (of In Search of Excellence fame) built a whole method around it, called Management by Walking Around. It differs from Gemba Walking in lacking a specific focus.
Tom Peters picked up the concept after it was invented by the founders of Hewlett-Packard
Re: Founder Mode
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it was Henry Ford, or maybe both.
henry ford was also pretty far from this warren buffett mode of letting the upper management of the company do what they want. very deeply involved in every level of the company, much like steve jobs
WRT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41417363 the story I heard about Ford management vs GM management was that Ford had a "system" which involved looking around at the heights of various stacks of reports in his office and intervening where he felt things were out of whack.
Upon reflection, if each sheet of each report, on average, dealt with about the same dollar value of things as the other sheets in its stack, then his system, far from being madness, would've just been an early, analogue and low-pass-filtered, lo-tech "business intelligence" dashboard.
Re: Founder Mode
#766I 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'…
Literally what the CEO of Snowflake did, by posting a long corporate speak linkedin post everywhere on the web.
Re: Founder Mode
#767Founder Mode has existed for a hundred years, probably more. Manager Mode evolved because of the inherent limitations of Founder Mode. PG really doesn't address the limitations of Founder Mode, because the appeal of Founder Mode is that it is possibly better than Manager Mode.
As a multiple-time founder and also someone who post-founding has worked in the C-Suite from small to midsize companies, what I usually see are founders with narrow skillsets and little to no developmental pathway to improve beyond their core skills. Helicoptering is frequent and at times, very destructive because Founder Mode requires significant interpersonal skills the larger that organizations get. "Micromanaging" is often seen as "telling me how to do my job even if you have no idea how to do my job". And if your VC wants you to scale significantly, there really aren't a lot of good examples of Founder Mode doing that, but there are indeed a lot of examples of non Founder Mode doing it and a huge ecosystem/culture that supports it.
Re: Founder Mode
#768Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
The long short of it is that revenue keeps falling, they're barely making a profit, and at best, they're just inching toward a net positive. They've been losing money for the past 6 years, and this year they're looking to make a small profit.
They have little debt, and lots of cash at hand, but seemingly no good core business model.
If they can convert this, great - but they're not much more worth than the cash they have. If they can't use that money to grow, then what good is it?
Re: Founder Mode
#769Re: Founder Mode
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t really understand why companies block lower level people from emailing ceo… I would think you could get chatgpt to rank the emails in some way…
Because the judgment of tens of thousands of individuals on the importance of their particular issues and the framing of said issues in a way the CEO can understand does not correlate with their disposition towards emailing the CEO.
How would judgments correlate with dispositions ?