Feels like I am taking crazy pills when I read about this stuff. Like 1500 words that boil down to "make sure you're paying attention to whether or not people are doing a good job".
What is "founder mode"?
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Re: What is "founder mode"?
#12> Instead, I believe that great leaders have to be able to dig into the details, have an incredibly high bar for quality, and ultimately do great IC work themselves. Great managers have to manage the work - they should primarily be responsible for quality and speed of output. Managing people must be secondary to managing the product.
If you are ever confused about founder-mode vs manager-mode, this is the one single insight that you need to internalize.
Put in other words, the org needs leaders who drive from the front. Not managers who build empires and run performance reviews from the back.
Driving from the front involves looking at external-facing data - customer happiness, features that land better, maintenance of services - things that make the customers life better - whether internal customer of external customer. They need to spend a lot of time collaborating with peer leaders, distant leaders, diagonal leaders, different departments regardless of anyone's position in the org chart.
However, most large tech companies are filled with dogshit management that tries to micromanage number of commits, meetings, standups, Jira points, velocity, performance calibrations, stack ranking, PIPs - aka inward looking things that are mostly set up to catch their own people doing something. Also called politics - personal gain triumphs all.
Even a 5th grader can tell you - practice makes perfect. And if your leaders are practicing inward politics as opposed to outward exploration and collaboration, you are getting exactly what they are practicing - inward politics.
Re: What is "founder mode"?
#13I am glad he is calling out the C-levels for their propensity to lie and 'manage up'. This is a character trait that needs to be annihilated. We should not be filtering for what is effectively psychopathy. I have watched so many amazing and sustainable products die because someone let the MBAs in. After sitting through so much of this crap dogma in my own business school classes, I would say the vast majority of what…
I don't like it more than you do, but it exists because it works in practical reality.
To replace it you must come up with something that works even better.
Re: What is "founder mode"?
#14Feels like I am taking crazy pills when I read about this stuff. Like 1500 words that boil down to "make sure you're paying attention to whether or not people are doing a good job".
It's also crazy that people are buying into the idea of 'Founder Mode' when Airbnb is one of the companies that is very much riding on the moat it created a while back while not doing anything much that can even remotely be called customer-obsessive (which is the lesson they could really learn from Steve Jobs)
Re: What is "founder mode"?
#15Replace managers with AI
Someone should at least do the experiment and see what happens. I can see it now: ChatCEO.
Re: What is "founder mode"?
#16something jeff bezos always warned against was the "narrative fallacy" - for one to believe so strongly in a compelling story that they dont stop for data. here's the stock charts of the founder of founder mode vs a professional manager mode guy :) https://x.com/ericnewcomer/status/1830998969490526423 just a fun reminder not to take everything as gospel. to engage more substantively with TFA: > I think the general pa…
> here's the stock charts of the founder of founder mode vs a professional manager mode guy :)
I've always told myself if I start a company that ever reaches, say, 250+ employees, I'd step down. First, playing a management game doesn't interest me (it's sort of like Risk vs Monopoly; the former is fun, the latter I find boring). And second, I just like building things. I wish the meme/essay would be about "builder mode" because I do think that's more of a thing than "founder mode."
I also think, uncontroversially I'd wager, that the skillset is just different. Building an MVP, finding product market fit, pivoting, trying new things, failing, and doing it all over (and over, and over) again is just absolutely fundamentally different than running a large corporation, trying to maneuver around market sentiment, dealing with politics, and so on.
Re: What is "founder mode"?
#17something jeff bezos always warned against was the "narrative fallacy" - for one to believe so strongly in a compelling story that they dont stop for data. here's the stock charts of the founder of founder mode vs a professional manager mode guy :) https://x.com/ericnewcomer/status/1830998969490526423 just a fun reminder not to take everything as gospel. to engage more substantively with TFA: > I think the general pa…
This seemed like an obvious blindspot in the pg essay - if you take the 0.1% most successful founders and put them in a room together (which is the context of his essay) then of course you're going to come away looking for that special ingredient which makes these people so special.
It could just be luck. But you're not likely to learn much without also talking to all the people who were just as talented and still failed.
Re: What is "founder mode"?
#18To equity-holders, it's code for the obsession that makes founders work extra-hard to please the financiers. To employees, it's code for being an abusive asshole. FWIW, I would never describe any of the (successful, with exits and now-successful brands) founders I worked for this way. It's disgusting. It's been a long, long time since pg had to answer to employees. He clearly no longer understands the current labor m…
I think the most damning comment of all on "founder mode" came not from the critics but from a LinkedIn post giving Brian Chesky apparently sincere praise for purportedly examplifying it. Apparently AirBNB had completely screwed up customer support responses to a fellow founder to the extent they'd blocked her, but as she was a member of the YC alumni network, a quick message and Brian resolved her in a few minutes, at the weekend. Who needs process or executive decision making at lower levels when you have "founder mode"?!
Customer support mistakes are unavoidable in large companies and AirBNB definitely isn't the worst offender in that regard, but I can't really imagine a bigger example of dysfunction in a B2C business than customer support resolution being the CEO needing to respond to personal messages of customers well connected enough to reach him via private channels. But now customer support failure is actually something to aspire to, provided it involves the important virtue of CEOs being busy at weekends.
Re: What is "founder mode"?
#19Feels like I am taking crazy pills when I read about this stuff. Like 1500 words that boil down to "make sure you're paying attention to whether or not people are doing a good job".
A lot of people, including people in attendance, do too. I think the reason is that people read Paul Graham posts about startup management as if they were written on stone tablets. Sometimes I think he intends for them to be taken that way (and in some cases, I think I get why), but this was not one of those cases, and the discourse ran away with it.
That said: there's a real phenomenon Graham and Chesky were grappling with, and if you've done startups for awhile --- startups, in particular, because they give you the vantage point of seeing a company's management processes develop from zero --- you've almost certainly seen it yourself. Not enough has been written about it! The point Graham was trying to make isn't banal (or wrong).
It's just not fully formed, and is being taken that way.
Re: What is "founder mode"?
#20> At Monzo, we experimented with some pretty wacky management structures at times. There was a period when our middle managers were basically just responsible for “pastoral care” of each employee. They were not connected at all with the output that the ICs were producing. It was totally insane and overlapped with our period of lowest productivity by far. Funny - I took a manager role where the company was trying this…
> Lowest productivity period of my career, for the entire company
"Productivity" is a nebulous concept in knowledge work. So unless you're referring to a factory with a very concrete, measurable output, this isn't particularly meaningful term.
How was the quality and employee satisfaction (as shown by solicited feedback or subjective anecdotes, plus attrition/turnover, etc.)?