You always have a "boss", either the regular one you report to in a company or if you are the founder/owner/CEO of a company it will be your clients, your board or stockholders. Also having a good boss that shields your from the BS may be better than no boss at all.
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
41–50 of 54 posts
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#42Sure, because no hunter/gatherer tribes had a chief, medicine woman or other revered person who both gave direction to their tribe, and to whom the tribe was responsible. A pretty weak argument against bosses. Humans naturally tend to form hierarchies - the boss is simply one node in that hierarchy. That some people thrive in such positions doesn't mean it's our natural state.
Humans don't naturally form hierarchies. At least I don't always look to an authority figure to tell me what to do. I usually want independence and creative space, along with the advice and aid of knowledgeable colleagues. I chafe under the yoke of arbitrary authority. But maybe I'm not human.
You're human, but you're not all humans. I think people have a continuum of attitudes on what they're willing to trade autonomy for. I've met a lot of people who are happy to have someone tell them what to do, because it means they don't need to figure it out for themselves. That's not bad, it's sort of a necessary ingredient of working together that some people need to be more willing to follow than to lead.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#43"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. T…
And if you bootstrap, you lose freedom in other ways. What kinds of businesses can be bootstrapped constrains your options. The market becomes your boss, and no amount of soft-skills or convincing arguments can change its mind.
Put that way, with investors you can say "At least my bosses are human"
(Note, I'm not saying one is better than the other in all cases, just that "bootstrapping gives you ultimate freedom" isn't true)
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#44> 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…
One important aspect to take into account is the fact that a company 's size is determined also by the size of the market it operates in. In US or China you'll get megacorps while in tiny countries the size will be way smaller.
If we add in the fact that the economies get globalized, all of the sudden you Apple and the like. Any successful startup in a global market, starting out in a large national market will be flooded with capital and still grow to fit the size of their success.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans don't naturally form hierarchies. At least I don't always look to an authority figure to tell me what to do. I usually want independence and creative space, along with the advice and aid of knowledgeable colleagues. I chafe under the yoke of arbitrary authority. But maybe I'm not human.
You're human, but you're not all humans. I think people have a continuum of attitudes on what they're willing to trade autonomy for. I've met a lot of people who are happy to have someone tell them what to do, because it means they don't need to figure it out for themselves. That's not bad, it's sort of a necessary ingredient of working together that some people need to be more willing to follow than to lead.
I think people confuse division of labor with hierarchy. The former means other people make decisions I don't care to. The latter means others tell me what to do and are acknowledged as my superiors.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#46But 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." There's a reason for that . Ronald Coase in his Theory of the firm explained that th…
There is huge difference between theory/Theory and practice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomáš_Baťa#Career
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#47And 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 tec…
I also thought of Valve when reading that sentence. Being anarchic is a compelling idea. There are some conditions to be met though. You would need highly autonomous people who have good grab of the big picture to drive the group forward.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#48Sure, because no hunter/gatherer tribes had a chief, medicine woman or other revered person who both gave direction to their tribe, and to whom the tribe was responsible. A pretty weak argument against bosses. Humans naturally tend to form hierarchies - the boss is simply one node in that hierarchy. That some people thrive in such positions doesn't mean it's our natural state.
Hunter/gatherer tribe is an oxymoron. Hunter gatherers are grouped together in bands, not tribes.
By the time a society has a chief, it is always larger than a band, and almost always larger than even a tribe.
The great mass of data from anthropological studies of these types of societies contradicts most of what you said.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#49pg said: "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."
I assume he's funding companies in the States? One of the bigger advantages of working for a large(r) company is health insurance. Or do all of Y Combinator's startups have good health insurance?
And as others have written, things involving "stuff" tend to need to scale. This might not be a problem in that pg might be confining his remarks to software startups, not things like engineering or science companies?
The odd thing, is that many bloggers have written that while it's great to do a startup, it's crap to work for one. So if it's crap to work for a startup AND for a larger company, I guess everything will be done in groups of 2-4 people?!
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#50But 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." There's a reason for that . Ronald Coase in his Theory of the firm explained that th…
There is huge difference between theory/Theory and practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomáš_Baťa#Career
In theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice they are not.