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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

651–660 of 772 posts

Re: Founder Mode

#651
I see employees and founders fall into different categories depending on when they join.

Founders and first group of employees are the creators. The ones who often care deeply and want to bring new ideas to life, creating value for customers (and eventually shareholders) - Higher risk for this group.

As the company grows but is still early on the journey, the next group tends to also care and often want to protect whats been built while helping creating new value. This group likely wants to earn a bit more having joined later. This group are taking less risk as there are likely already a few rounds raised at this point.

The company continues to grow and starts hire more staff to help it operate at scale. These people are disconnected and tend to arrive to extract more value than the groups before them. These are often managers or extra execs, more sales teams on commission etc.

This new group is not here to defend whats built and often arent as invested in the idea. They didnt join out of a burning desire to see the world get better - they are here to earn well and push their careers.

I think this is where founder mode helps. It keeps the ones who care deeply about the business, the idea, the customers, the world, the employees etc in the know. They keep their finger on the pulse and can help steer everyone away from just chasing personal gain. They can bring back the guiding principles that may have been diluted through various levels of "those who don't care as much".

I think early employees - those taking the most risk aside from the founders - could also be leveraged here. In fact, I think those early employees could be considered mini-founders if they are are still around at later stages.

Re: Founder Mode

#652

I'm not surprised this theme would be popular with founding CEOs but not really sure what the promised "Ground-breaking Management Mode you Won't Believe!" actually is. Is it take your favourite employees on a retreat, don't worry about the message this sends? Stop hiring mediocre middle managers and do... something else? Run a giant public company like a 20-person start-up, only don't? Delegate yet stay in control o…

This post is literally all over social media. The argument seems no deeper than "hire good people who care about the business". Not exactly rocket science.

Re: Founder Mode

#653
Most tech companies are terrible at hiring "managers". I agree with Paul's premise, but the solution to micromanage is missing the point. If companies hired actual manager/leaders, they would see better outcomes.

Re: Founder Mode

#655

I am writing a book about an idea - software literacy is a new form of actual literacy and will be as impactful. And I keep coming back to how important organising above the Dunbar number is and how bad economics etc is at this. This resonates for me - and it’s still just grasping in the dark - but they seem to revolve around the idea that with software a company is no longer a lot of Dunbar number tribes working tog…

> if it’s software, it can be in one repo

Hm, so a company in founder mode is like a monorepo with all projects, software, documentation, branches, processes, owners, contributors, activities, tests, issues, pull requests and code reviews.. Consolidated, visible, under source control.

Following that analogy, a company in manager mode is like many repos independently developing, collaborating with each other when needed but mostly siloed and managed separately. Maybe like microservices..

> workers are CPUs so the coders are new managers

An organization as a form of parallel computing with humans. It feels like this could yield some insights by digging deeper into the concept.

Re: Founder Mode

#656

Most tech companies are terrible at hiring "managers". I agree with Paul's premise, but the solution to micromanage is missing the point. If companies hired actual manager/leaders, they would see better outcomes.

correct. the last thing that a company needs is a CEO who doesn't empower his direct reports, can't hire good ones, thinks they are all fakers and tries to meddle in every detail, instead of thinking about where the company is going and where it should go and how it should get there.

Re: Founder Mode

#657

Some theories about what makes the founder mode effective: 1. It's about incentives. If I own substantial equity of a company and I consider it "my child", the reward for doing a good job will be much greater than if I was a hired manager. The reward is not just financial but also self-worth and reputation. 2. Selection bias. When we talk about "founders", we really mean founders that have built successful companies.…

is there any evidence it's more effective? PG offered one example, ABNB, which has had a lagging stock price since IPO.

Re: Founder Mode

#658

> what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers Yep, that is the key problem. "Hire good people..." is good advice. If it is failing for so many startups, then the quote above is what is really going on -- startups are failing to hire good people. If they had been succeeding, the advice would have worked. What should be getting asked is how to identify what "good" is for a specific founder's vision.…

if you can't hire good people, "founder mode" is not going to help you.

Re: Founder Mode

#659
post #350

It’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 g…

yes, correct.

You cannot get involved in every decision as a CEO of a large company. Suppose you did a skip level meeting. Who is going to gaslight you more, the lower level person or your direct report with a massive stock award who is incentivized for the company to succeed? far from clear.

Re: Founder Mode

#660

This 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…

He was implicitly referring to what Chesky did recently at AirBnB (personal involvement in lower-level decisions eg product design in his case as it’s his forte).

I've been using AirBnb for a long time and product is the same, I see no innovations in it. Maybe that's why the stock price has been lagging.
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