You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
paulgraham.com
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
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Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#2"We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company."
Can't say this has been true based on my experience so far at startups - there are a lot of bad managers/executives out there who have no business managing a business and the damage is probably a lot worse at a startup than at a big company. Based on a lot of anecdotal stories from developers, this seems to be an all too common pattern at startups.
Also, startups tend to have a bad problem unless bootstrapped - they're beholden to their funders, who can sometimes recommend courses of actions counter to what a good long term business should be doing, causing executives to make bad decisions with regards to treating their employees properly.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#3"We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company." Can't say this has been true based on my experience so far at startups - there are a lot of bad managers/executives out there who have no business managing a business and the damage is probably a lot worse at a startup than at a big company. Based on a lot o…
... all of which I've seen play out at big companies, too.
Yes, having poorly-perfoming individuals in key roles can hurt a startup much more than a big company. But the experience of working for the startup in that case sucks no more than working for the big company.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#4we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.
The size of the company has little relation with the size of the groups you work in. I've worked for a couple of companies with around 8-10k employees and a couple more with around 1000 employees, and all those cases I've always worked in groups of 2-20.
Also, having a (good) boss is great. They handle all the shit work (like sales and customer relations) and run interference so that you can do you real job.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#5"We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company." Can't say this has been true based on my experience so far at startups - there are a lot of bad managers/executives out there who have no business managing a business and the damage is probably a lot worse at a startup than at a big company. Based on a lot o…
> so many ... that we have enough data to see patterns
I believe that there's enough data to _see_ patterns, but is there enough data for these patterns to be statistically significant?
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#6And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.
That might be worth exploring. I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don't know any technology companies that have done it.
Isn't Valve such a company?
http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#7"(...) a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure (...) I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don't know any technology companies that have done it."
Isn't this what Valve has done?
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#8But I think this is the weakest part of the article :
"And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only
way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no
structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way
components of a market economy do."
"According to Ronald Coase, people begin to organise their production in firms
when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange,
given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm .."
Sometimes , I think that the zeitgeist has swung too far in favour towards being an entrepreneur instead of working for someone and making something awesome.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#9> Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size.
This is another reason why we should really limit companies to a maximum size. Other reasons are that companies should not become too big to fail, and that smaller companies lead to a more modular economy, where one company uses the outputs of several other companies, instead of having a few MegaCorps with an opaque, internal economy.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#10"We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company." Can't say this has been true based on my experience so far at startups - there are a lot of bad managers/executives out there who have no business managing a business and the damage is probably a lot worse at a startup than at a big company. Based on a lot o…
>they're beholden to their funders
This. Once you accept funding, you're working for the money people.
Forget those narratives of heroic freedom. Your situation isn't really all that different to any other corporate environment.
If the money doesn't like you as a founder, you can lose your job (at best) or be back-stabbed out (at worst.)
And if the project isn't viable, it dies anyway. So you're still out of a job.
There's a cultural difference, in that you have more agency at the start. But the script you follow is already written by the surrounding financial culture.
You have no freedom at all to deviate from it - unless you bootstrap.