Gervais principle, like it or not,… has been pretty accurate IMO
yep, my first though as well here - and one of my favorite reads.
lots of posts, even one this month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41214180
Founder Mode
341–350 of 772 posts
Re: Founder Mode
#342I struggle to see "founder mode" as something that scales. Is there not some self-selection bias occurring here, given the audience "included a lot of the most successful founders we've funded"? If a founder is exceptional and all of the other stars necessary for a startup to succeed have aligned, this may be a good approach. But then we are just back to the question YC has always tried to answer: what makes a founde…
why are we so fixated on scaling companies? there are certainly more companies that simply failed because they thought they needed to put in the organizational structure to be huge rather than doing what startups are supposed to do - be plucky and creative and work work hard and create something of unique value. that's enough to get you your 9 figure exit. maybe companies have lifecycles, and maybe blowing out an org chart 4 levels deep is a problem for the next team?
Re: Founder Mode
#343Maybe management style is just not that important compared to other factors, like product vision and strategy? Perhaps founders who are so good at those other things can lead companies to success in spite of mediocre management? That would explain the lack of consensus.
Re: Founder Mode
#344hacker news glorifying paul graham for glorifying his startups with survivorship bias is getting really old
there's different ways to success and it depends on a lot of factors you can't anticipate or control. ex-post rationalizing it and generalizing it into self-help / business book snippets of wisdom is laughable.
this reminds me of the time where every middle manager suddenly thought being a steve jobs brand of asshole is the path to business success
Re: Founder Mode
#345One of the first things that was emphasized in a recent "Management 101" seminar (taught by a HR grunt) was that effective "management" consists of 3 roles:
- Management
- Leadership
- Coaching
It seems that Graham wasn't aware of this and believes him and his buddies are the first to identify the latter roles, albeit as "Founder".
It wouldn't surprise me that the sophistication of management theory in SV startup scene is so low. It seems that most startup-scale innovation in SV comes from talented ICs rather than well-managed projects. Isn't that the theory behind "startups" in the first place?
The big tech players definitely have some genuinely excellent managers. It just hasn't trickled down to the YC level apparently.
Re: Founder Mode
#346This whole article is written around one key sentence: > There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is. But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5 more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete. And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like…
Based on pg's other work, I would guess that previous drafts of this essay had concrete examples, but they were removed after deciding that including them would make the discussion all about those specifics. But in general I think it's clear: founder mode here means having strong opinions about all parts of the company. Maybe it's a technical founder telling salespeople what they should emphasise in their sales pitch…
Is it possible this essay about founder mode is itself written in founder mode?
Whatever the "it" is that constitutes a startup's purpose often can't be fully articulated in mission statements, OKRs, core values, etc. Either it's simply ineffable, or it's a metamorphosizing snapshot of the leading edge of a rapid process of discovery. Expecting such an already-abstruse concept to faithfully percolate down a rigid reporting chain is ridiculous, like sending old-English scrolls via carrier pigeon to narrate a live sporting event.
But communication of the "it" still has to happen, if imperfectly. So someone in founder mode would naturally focus on delivering the most faithful and timely version of "it" to the points in the organization where it'll have the most impact and be least susceptible to corruption in transit. Today that might be to a UX engineer. Tomorrow it might be to the board. It's a kind of plate-spinning that aims to reduce skew from the latest version.
Re: Founder Mode
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Cracked is just slang for insanely talented, ergo...
I've only heard the term in reference to https://posthog.com/founders/cracked-manifesto
Which is the same thing. You've also heard them called rockstars or x10 before. They are referring to the same folks, but calling them "easy to manage" is a hilarious statement.
Re: Founder Mode
#348"Thanks to...Elon Musk...for reading drafts of this."
Good to know he's still held in high esteem by these people.
Re: Founder Mode
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good points in pg's essay: * CEO/founder should engage directly at multiple levels rather than only interact with the company through their direct reports. (Same applies at every management level, btw) * Delegation is good, and it should happen in proportion with trust. * The dominant culture at many tech companies is flawed and sub-optimal. Bad points: * "Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides". The…
There are many very good reasons why the top 100 most valuable people would not be the department heads. Cracked engineers, designers, growth people, AEs... the best ICs shouldn't necessarily be in management positions. Yet, the CEO should neither be air-gapped from those people nor managing their work/career on a day to day basis.
I like this comment because I think it does a good job of demonstrating four kinds of important people.
You have people who are most important to a:
- a project. - a problem. - the organization.
And I think we can divide organization into internal and external. When you divide like that, you’ll usually end up with four very different lists with some overlap at an upper management level.
None of the four areas are more important than others. If your software problem has a month long outage, that’s a huge problem. But that’s different from if you only have two months of runway left or if nobody has cleaned your office in a month. And since the problems are different, the people involved should be different too. Then you’ll end up with a lot of different hierarchies of most important people depending on what lens you’re looking through.
Re: Founder Mode
#350It’s interesting that Graham doesn’t seem to say what Founder Mode looks like in any capacity, other than referring to a few outlier founders.
Less than one quarter of companies that go public do so with their original CEO.
Most people would say that indicates Founder Mode doesn’t generally work as companies scale.
It looks like Graham feels that it’s because too many founders listen to common wisdom and eventually get pushed out / leave?
I honestly don’t buy it. In order to scale, companies have to learn how to operationalize more and more processes. This fundamentally looks like “hiring people and giving them the space and authority to operate.”
I feel like his entire post could have been reframed as “just as VCs know there are relatively few excellent founders and identifying them is hard, there are similarly few excellent executives and identifying them is also hard.”