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What is "founder mode"?

tomblomfield.com

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Re: What is "founder mode"?

#3

Post by henning »

jsifalda wrote: post #2

Thanks for sharing! Good take. There is also this checklist I used to use for more "practical references" https://www.craftengineer.com/the-founder-mode-used-by-brian...

like everything else coming from startup people, none of this means anything.

none of the items listed there preclude a CEO from only talking to direct reports and viewing the org chart as a set of black boxes that their reports are responsible. having "engineering and design report to the founder" doesn't mean anything. is that saying everyone who does engineering and design has an executive as their manager?

nothing in that list talks about hiring or firing practices.

whomever wrote this post would have great success as an object-oriented clean code thought leader, where their skills at saying nothing would earn them slots at conferences and social media followers.

Re: What is "founder mode"?

#4

Post by Aurornis »

> 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 approach. I was the manager, but I wasn’t empowered to manage the team or their work. They had a lot of feel-good ideas about empowering employees and reducing the role of managers.

It had the same result. Lowest productivity period of my career, for the entire company. It turns out there is some value to traditional management structures when implemented properly. Nearly all of the companies that experiment with weird management structure ideas seem to discover this eventually, and either revert to traditional management structures or they get built up in the shadows via social standing within the company.

Re: What is "founder mode"?

#5

Post by debit-freak »

To 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 market, nor what it implies about actual workplace conditions.

EDIT: To be clear, "obsessive" attention to detail is still what makes products work coherently. It's the rhetoric that an individual, even a "founder" taking on mountains of potential value, should (or even can) shoulder and internalize this, without breaking, that is inherently wrong.

Re: What is "founder mode"?

#7

Post by swyx »

something 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 pattern that Brian was identifying was the following. A young, inexperienced founder with limited management experience is running a rapidly scaling company. Famous VCs invest a lot of money and join the board. Headcount passes 100 and quickly grows beyond 1000. The VCs (who often have never run anything themselves) encourage the founder to hire “executives” with “scaling experience”. > > The founder is told to “empower” these executives, who typically then implement techniques that worked for them at previous companies. But, too often, these techniques fail in the new company.

yes, i have worked at a company where this happened — sans the "quickly grows beyond 1000" - we never got there before our hired gun execs made enough political moves to effectively kill the company momentum. i dont know if our founder couldve righted the ship by himself since he had his own issues to overcome, but i'm 100% sure he would have been better off just having the hired guns be advisors rather than management layers.

Re: What is "founder mode"?

#8

Post by pdntspa »

I 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 they/we are taught is actively harmful to most businesses.

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