Anyone can raise problem with him & he will fix it directly.

AirBNB is a company that’s entirely built upon getting around regulations and destroying wealth (but passing on the costs onto others).

Good people coming in to the company assume it provides some actual value so they don’t make decisions that are net negative and just ensure passing on the cost to others.

But this isn’t something that’s gonna be stated outright so it largely remains within the head of the founder so the ideas that make the company work also remain within the head of the founder which is why they’re essential for the company to tick.

"This is Mark Zuckerberg reading that Paul Graham asking and being like, I’m going to show everyone how alive we are. I’m going to change the name [from Facebook to Meta]. Does Sundar Pichai have the authority to turn off google.com tomorrow? They have the technical power, but do they have the authority? Let’s say Sundar Pichai made this his sole mission. He came into Google tomorrow and said, 'I’m going to shut google.com down.' I don’t think you keep this position too long. Now, does Mark Zuckerberg have that button for facebook.com? I think he does. And this is exactly what I mean and why I bet on him so much more than I bet on Google."

"Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports."

Whatever happened to "Management by Wandering Around"? Usually credited to HP but Shakespeare had Henry V do it (see act 4 scene 1) and there are probably even earlier examples.

Specifically, I wonder if the reason "founder mode" strikes singular founders as a resonant story, is because it's representative of a story that can even have a singular narrative. The alternative (what pg calls "manager mode" of hiring the best people and letting them work) is perhaps one where there's more narratives unfolding and exploring the space. This could lead to either success or failure. Some spaces have less of a singular story, because they run and persist and thrive based on having multiple stories working together. Sometime the stories are dissonant. I've been in companies where the strength felt like it was in how a balance of things existed together, without the need to collapse them into a single totalizing narrative. This unresolved dissonance in a community can be either a weakness or a strength. The ability for a place or an organization or a community or a culture to hold contradictory truths, this allows a culture to hold within arms-reach an archive of more tactics and strategies (some useful in the current moment, some not), from which to call on when the environment changes, and new needs arise. That's how vibrant ecologies work.

Anyhow, this is a bit of a riff, and I imagine some people might be strongly opposed. I am not saying it's good or bad to be in founder mode. I'm saying it depends. But founder mode will tend to create singular founders who have a loud story to tell. The story is maybe less clear and loud when the other mode prevails and leads to success. It looks like a hundred ppl succeeding together, and no one person has the answer as to why, nor do they all agree on what that is. So it means that narrative will be more diffuse and less boosted.

Maybe more holographic in a metaphorical sense, where the information is encoded throughout a social fabric like a diffraction pattern, and no one person holds the whole narrative or truth, which emerges from the interaction of many narratives, both aligned and opposing (likely in small ways below the surface).

Context: I co-founded a tech community in Toronto (now ~7000 people), which for almost 9 years has run weekly participatory civic events (50-70 attendees), literally without ever missing a week yet. To put it lightly, we've learned a bit about distributed leadership, and my comments comes from that experience. It's very different from company modes, but some companies run on principles I feel quite aligned on.

Life is random, there are no unconditional rules for success in competitive spaces. Discretion is always key. Sometimes luck plays a role: PG’s silly LISP startup as a prime example.

screenshots/links to new paul graham essay

[1] https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DLtJAShDN54ooPWpBspHPV98rh2...

Musk as a founder-like role (he wasn’t actually a founder) has the incentives to make this happen. in this case, he had a specific milestone to reach to get a very lucrative bonus. at the same time, he had a lot of stock and would not want to do anything that would damage the long-term prospects of the company. Whereas an executive might go after a bonus without worrying about long-term negative effects. Even if an executive has stock options, they might not vest and even though they are an executive, the founder and others are creating the fate of the company and the value of the options, not just them.

I see why all the hidden elements need to be just so or the whole thing is meaningless.

Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but it's rare to find someone that truly gets things rather than just going through the motions. If you do, its likely they have their own idea.

It feels like every decision I make gets resistance from people who live their lives in mediocrity. If they really knew the best course of action they'd be the one in charge and I'd be the one trying to give the mediocre advice.

I'm so tired, but nobody else is going to do it right.

The solution here, like most dialectics, is to do both: hire people who are not just smart, but who actually care for their part of the business in a way founders wish they could do if they had the time, intelligence, and grace.

As a non-founder, I'm so glad when the founders hire someone who cares enough to get their job done that I can rely on them and focus on my job -- and I aspire to be someone who others are glad to rely on. But from even two steps away, that is indistinguishable from the principles of division of labor and the practice of mutual political respect that strangle companies in bureaucracy. But the two situations are night and day, and obvious to those who live it.

So I think the difference is not whether the founder can reach down a level, but whether they -- or the COO or whoever plays this role -- can arrive on any scene and quickly tell if it's BS. Then when everyone knows BS is not safe and that commitment is respected, they'll find the courage to not play games.

So then a company runs well not because the founder is good, but because people understand and buy into what good means for the business.

[0] https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm

One systemic problem in the more mature parts of the industry seems to me the layering of management over leadership. Maybe one needs more of the former than the latter but without the latter in each layer it is impossible to turn a larger ship on a new course or adjust speed.

Can you imagine being the 101st to 110th most important and not getting an invite, while people with lower rank do?

I suspect the value of such a tradition is only able to be captured in very large organizations, otherwise it’s just a morale-destroying exercise for 80%.

I've worked for mid-level leadership in large companies (maybe 1,000 people reporting to them) that basically just cast spells and hope the magic gets done by the people on the ground. I've also worked for leadership at the same level that invests time every month to have skip level conversations 2-3 levels removed in the org chart. There is a material difference, in my experience, in the timeliness and consistency of how things get executed in the latter.

Micro-management isn't always the worst thing. Sometimes it's necessary.

"hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." is not orthogonal to running your start-up as a founder...or is it, and I'm doing it wrong?

I'd love to understand where someone like Satya Nadella would fit into this example. He isn't the founder, but he runs the company as if he is, doesn't he? So "founder" isn't the correct description.

I hope a link to the talk is made public, so we can decode what Brian is saying for ourselves.

What a long post to write "Well if you hire the wrong people they will drive the company into the ground"

>One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to founders afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do. [...] , and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.

Those 3 paragraphs are similar to the description from Slava Akhmechet in an 2018 HN comment[1] and matches my experience :

>When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll self select some of these people who will slip past their psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running around your company within a month or two.

>From the founders's perspective the org is basically an overactive genie. It will do what you say, but not what you mean. Want to increase sales in two quarters? No problem, sales increased. Oh, and we also subtly destroyed our customers's trust. Once the steaks are high, founders basically have to treat their org as an adversarial agent. You might think -- but a good founder will notice! Doesn't matter how good you are -- you've selected world class politicians that are good at getting past your exact psychological makeup. Anthropic principle!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253

Management of an enterprize (in general) aims to identify and exercise available options for "creating value" - in whatever terms that is measured. This "options space" is vast and founders versus managers are intimate with very different subsets.

Venture capital (VC) is fundamentally at odds with good business. VC demands exponential growth from a finite world; something has to give. What usually happens is the company grows to the point that it's impossible to keep the "professional fakers" away. Then the Iron Law[1] kicks in, or enshittification[2], or both.

Do you want the benefits of a small company (sustainability, happy employees, happy customers, good products)? Then build a small company. If you want the opposite of those things but also lots of money, try your hand at the VC blackjack tables. Maybe you'll be lucky and this time, it will be different.

[1]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail4...

[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The difference in this case between a "founder" and a "manager" is more about understanding the nuts and bolts of the business and being able to lean on that understanding in ways that require you to cut through the org chart.

Is it surprising that leaders who don't understand a business and aren't willing to engage across the full depth/breadth of the business are less effective than those that try to treat everything as an abstract cashflow machine?

Manger mode is "hire good people and give them space to do their job". Founders mode is Steve Job's way "<same as manager mode> + make those good people feel important".

There are many founders, who failed to scale their sturtups, because they did something wrong. But it is not because they ALL in fact did the same mistake. It is just many of them can match their particular mistake with the vague concept of "bad manager mode advice".

The downside is that when he died he left an organization that relied on that strong founder making things work.

Bob Iger is a delegator that handles the business, he doesn’t get deeply involved in the creative direction, he needs good creative leadership to report to him.

Delegation was obviously in play, but responsibility was never diffused. At the end of the day, there was a direct chain of responsibility from you all the way up to Bezos, and he wouldn't hesitate to send one of his personal fixers in if things were going off the rails in a particular branch of the organisational tree.

His core concept is that one should slowly delegate responsibility. Not delegating anything is like the Offensive Lineman standing still. In that case the defense just runs around around you.

Instead he suggests that you move back slowly, offering resistance the way an O-Line does.

This seems very complimentary to what Paul mentioned.

In my simplified view, founders care about the company like it’s their baby. On the other hand, managers tend to focus more on their own careers, their teams, and external relationships. This is natural since they know they’ll likely move on to a different company at some point.

The founder of the company stands to make generationally life changing money, the people they hire do not.

Founder mode works because the founders are willing to spend every waking moment on work. They have time to get into the details of everything. And it's worth it for them because success could mean billions. It could mean they are set for life, as is the next 10 or 100 generations of their family.

Steve Jobs -- Billionaire. Brian Chesky -- also a billionaire. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang . Basically anyone you would name as successfully running a company in founder mode is most likely a billionaire. It's worth it to them to scarface everything to spend every waking moment on work.

But the people they hire don't have that incentive. Especially not anymore, with the way VCs are getting better at extracting value from companies. Exits for early employees aren't nearly life changing as they used to be, and exits for later employees at the stages we are talking about here are even worse.

https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/30/when-the-mismanageri...

Trained managers have learned how to continue to extract value from some discovered market, rather than create new value chains.

Founders are "content" oriented, managers are "process" oriented.

But I think the type of leadership this essay talks about comes from personality traits that are mostly determined by the end of one's adolescence: grit, obsessiveness/perfectionism, and vision.

I've found that a lot of wisdom PG passes on is novel, not 'conventional'; moreover the observation he offers is not something I would have been able to obtain through my own life experience, and I very much appreciate him putting his thoughts out into the world for us to learn from.

What was the point of the article? Don't delegate important decisions to the people below you, except for when you do? What PG is suggesting is a founder should understand all problem spaces the company exists in, better than any other employee in any position, in perpetuity, because no-one could possibly understand anything better than the founder. If you want labour to scale, you need to let people actually do their job.

Involving oneself at all levels of the company is by no means at odds with avoiding micromanagement. Likewise, neither is empowering people in your company with degrees of creative freedom that are aligned with the vision.

SV dogma dictates selecting for hustle, which is merely one trait in the equation. There's a lot of people out there with great hustle, executing on visions that aren't worth a damn. Some of these people then land large funding rounds and find themselves unsure of what to do, and end up succumbing to VC pressure to do something stupid that's wholly incongruent with their business (as opposed to the stupid things which are wholly congruent). For example, hiring bloodsucking C-suite and V-suite types.

Here's how I'd select if I ran an accelerator, in no particular order:

- Minimum 5 years working on the project already, ideally a decade

- Founder has decided it's what they want to do with their life

- Has a list of the first 100+ people they're going to hire picked out, with detailed explanations of who these people are and why they make sense

- Has a plan to sell each independently wealthy person on that list on why they'll be happy working the project when money isn't their primary concern

- Has a plan to sell investors who hopefully aren't VCs (because most suck)

- Has otherwise found VCs that don't suck

- Solid character; kind human being with principles

- Decent hustle acceptable; high perseverance required

Suffice it to say someone fitting these criteria probably wouldn't even get that precious 10-minute YC interview. Neither would most of the so-called eccentric folks out there. They'd be deemed failures. Or crazy. Especially the solo founders.

Speaking of dogma, there's a lot of emphasis placed on both coming up with business ideas and then externally validating those. Any founder that has a legitimate, deep-seated vision will find those concepts offensive. After all, Jobs is famous for the following quote:

'Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do.'

I omitted the rest, which was an apocryphal misquote of Henry Ford. Of course, Jobs was also needlessly ruthless and cruel. However, despite being an asshole, he was at least a world-class vision guy.

Good to know he's still held in high esteem by these people.

Do people consider the following people to operate in Founder Mode:

- Elon Musk?

- Larry Ellison?

- Mark Zuckerberg?

- Marc Benioff?

- Drew Houston?

Never heard the nonsense idea that it’s good or frequent advice to step back and let people do their thing in a startup.

Its that simple.

Or, they are where to play the game with some other sociopaths who know the silly rules are silly but lead to great TC if you play (and somewhere in the background there’s a company/product). Rinse/repeat because the median HBS grad needs a job somewhere!

I am surprised it apparently took a groundbreaking speech for a very experienced VC to grok this.

Probably a great example of founder mode?

I looked up this company Airbnb. I always used VRBO, which predates Airbnb by over a decade. I booked entire houses months in advance for extended stays.

According to this blog post Airbnb grew. But the stock is down over 8% even after the latest market rally. What's going on.

The question I have is what Airbnb grew into. The company has been around for a while. I let Big Tech show me the latest news. I did not ask for negative news, just any news.

Below is what I got. I must be missing why this Airbnb CEO is doing a good job and is worth listening to in spite the company's name appearing in all of this bad press.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevj77rdp89o

https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article291610590.html

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vrbo-nick-saban-ad-trolling-2...

https://www.kake.com/home/city-of-wichita-looking-to-add-law...

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2024/08/26/man-shot...

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/crime/2024/...

https://globalnews.ca/news/10723835/airbnb-hidden-camera-san...

https://www.businessinsider.com/restoration-train-car-airbnb...

https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/love-humor/airbnb-moun...

https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/jail-sentence-sought-for...

https://www.wxxv25.com/four-arrested-after-shooting-at-gulfp...

https://nypost.com/2024/08/20/lifestyle/i-stayed-in-a-1-a-ni...

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/business/gov-kathy-hochul...

https://www.summitdaily.com/opinion/letter-to-the-editor-fri...

It goes on. The reply will likely be "The reason is ... and this has nothing to do with Airbnb. Airbnb is doing fine. I love Airbnb. And so on." This is a forum sponsored by the Silicon Valley VC firm that financed Airbnb so I expect HN commenters will defend the company's actions or inaction.

Would rather just never appeal to authority - whether founder or manager. Nobody knows anything. All you can do is present a case for trying X and try it - might work, might not, iterate on what does.

Given that the environment is essentially "trying stuff", staff the team with good triers: People who can build, sell, and those who can manage releases and the day-to-day to keep people building and selling and managing the current thing.

I worry that this post will inspire founders everywhere to start micromanaging worse than before. As an IC, what's worse - having a manager? Or having a micromanaging founder who plays the role of manager/dev/everything else?

This is the Chesterton‘a Fence applied to running companies. It’s somewhat dark-comedy counterpart is the “always has been” meme.

You also have to take into account the % of bad actors involved online and elsewhere who want to misdirect you, misguide you, and ultimately to make you fail. Healthy skepticism and distrust helps a lot.

Elon put this great, in 2018:

> Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the "chain of command." Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

Managers don't have this safety net; failures will be evaluated more critically and they probably aren't the types to win at all costs. So they are more focused on avoiding fatal mistakes that will lose them their jobs, but don't end up achieving as much on average.

In a sports analogy, founders play to win and managers play not to lose.

But it's a spectrum not black and white. Every founder has to delegate and every founder has to bring on great people to do the work and let them breathe. I think its about freely enabling bold projects while minimizing the fear and anxiety at all levels, and figuring out the decision making and execution structure that works the best.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1eu574f/got_fu...

This should be screaming evidence that the standard way businesses are run filters out the most capable and most effective people from executive positions. This is the kind of thing you would expect profit-driven enterprises to actually care about, but no such luck because the executives who are positioned to make this change are exactly the people who should get replaced with extremely capable oddballs.

Assume that it's very hard to forecast a manager's fit and future performance. With a new CEO, manager mode is the less-risky proposition. Spread risk around by delegating more. The founder has a proven track record leading the company, making founder mode usually preferable.

In other words, the non-founder CEO may just be one of the professional fakers that the essay mentions as plausible subordinates. There's a ton of research literature on adverse selection of CEOs. Some of it goes back decades, so there's always the question of whether the selection process has improved over time. But there will always be people that excel at getting selected and promoted.

The way this hypothesis differs from the essay's is in boiling down to actual performance. A high-performing non-founder does not need manager mode, while a low-performing founder would be better off with it.

The managerial perspective is "just pay people more to motivate them" or otherwise "strong vision will motivate".

But paying someone more (at least beyond a class threshold) is only likely to motivate them in the short term. After a few months, they go back to hedonistic baseline.

"Strong vision" is just corpo-speak for corpo-speak. Real vision comes from a founder pushing as many sides of the company as possible, often by example rather than meetings.

Interestingly, our United States seems to have this problem. Genius and scrappy founders establish a government now overtaken by incompetent suits.

It may be the natural way of things. Success leads to complacency leads to incompetence. Eventually new players take over and the cycle repeats. Creative destruction and all that.

1. If you think you have it bad with the “professional fakers” in the US, try an alternative reality were they can’t legally be fired, or even demoted (e.g. Sweden).

- Startup. Doesn't know how to make money yet, or if it does, is still learning how to execute its vision. It's essential to have a small team of maximally competent people, so recruitment is cautious. Employees are pets, not cattle. Projects are executed in time linear in the man-hours required

- Scale-up. Has found an opportunity so big that it needs to occupy it as fast as possible, before the competition does. Recruitment has to take risks. Large critical projects are executed in time proportional to the square root of the man-hours required[1].

- Established business. Has big battalions, but does not grow them very quickly. concentrates on not losing its market position. Recruitment optimizes for fungibility. Projects are executed in time linear in the man-hours required.

Each of these requires a different skill set from leadership.

[1] McConnell, "Software estimation - Demystifying the black art"

This is why I still strongly advocate that, at some point in your career, you may consider reinventing the wheel if needed.

> In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode.

An interesting video [1] from Logically Answered referred to CEOs of type manager mode as Vanilla CEOs. In short, the video raises questions about innovation versus stability; while these Vanilla CEOs excel in financial growth, they may lack visionary leadership that is a built-in feature in the founder's DNA.

_________________

1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3RV8nMzh8

Founders can sometimes be walking contradictions of being hyper self critical and also have supreme confidence. Going from a 50 employee startup to being a part of a multinational corporation is a “corporate shock” that makes a founder think they are out of their depths and should just follow the corporate’s lead.

The founder vs manager mode definitely resonates with me. However, the lack of concrete success stories of “founder mode” (whatever that may mean) leads to most founders giving up their reigns to the horde of corporate MBAs and quietly quitting after their holdback period is over.

Why exert so much effort trying to paddle a canoe and steering against the giant cruiseship that is the mothership corporation, when you should just go start another company and reap your potential reward.

1) Those who try their very best to contribute more than they extract. They want to be compensated fairly to be sure; but they see their role as to bring value to the organization that is in excess to what they are paid in salary and benefits.

2) Those who want to extract as much as possible in return for as little value as they think they can get away with.

These attitudes exist at all levels from the CEO down to the lowest contributor on the organization chart.

Whether you use 'founder mode' or 'manager mode' to lead; building a culture that hires, keeps, and promotes the first type and tries to avoid the second, is critical.

No company of any reasonable size can only have the first kind, but many an organization that should have been successful, will go under when the second kind becomes pervasive.

Consider the famous Osbourne Effect[1], so named after a founder who blew it spectacularly.

Or how about the famous fraudsters whose schemes got so large because they lacked basic controls? (Ponzi to Madoff, but also Elizabeth Holmes and SBF)

Or how about Jack Welch (GE) and David Calhoun (Boeing), lauded for years until their damage came to light?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Or maybe, smart engineers who found companies just aren't generally that good at hiring.

Probably, but before we assume that Steve's management style was unabashedly good at scaling... well, it reminded me of this story from a former Apple employee:

https://techreflect.org/2019/05/horsey/

---

There used to be a weekly meeting with Steve Jobs to go over user interfaces and workflows for macOS [...] with the higher ups [...] After this meeting, there would be a “debriefing” where one or more of the attendees of that meeting would report to the underlings. Sometimes that included people like me. [...] What was fun about these debriefings is that they were like a game of telephone.

1. Steve might say something in the weekly meeting

2. Someone would jot down what they think he said

3. The notes might get passed to someone else who would go to the debriefing

4. Someone in the debriefing would relay their version of what was written down

The debriefing was a meeting often consisting of puzzled looks.

One time an icon change was being proposed. The note we got in the debriefing was that Steve said it was “horsey”, which prompted endless discussion:

• What does horsey mean?

• Is horsey good or bad?

• How do we make something less or more horsey?

• Is the horsey-ness something minor that needs tweaking or so major that it needs to be redone?

• Did anyone just ask Steve what the hell he meant?

[...] People would sometimes present the same content [to Steve at next week's meeting] and Steve would magically “change his mind” but I often wondered whether [...] what appeared to be a change of mind was just a message that was garbled in the first place.

There was definitely an element of control as well. Some of the higher ups who had closer access to Steve wanted to exercise more control than perhaps they had. For example, the horsey comment could be tweaked to fit a change someone below Steve felt needed to be made. Since not everyone had speed dial access to Steve, it was easy to take advantage of any ambiguity.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

- 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.

Same with “hire smart people and let them work”. When salaries are relatively low, consequences are limited and incentives are well aligned, that approach works. As soon as any of those things change, then the “manager mode” fails dramatically.

As someone who ascribes to “manager mode” most of the time, I’m going to start looking more at places where the assumptions break and (carefully) try out “founder mode”.

To me this points to a secondary problem further down the line in hiring. Why are you getting a bunch of professional fakers?

Maybe in hiring people (including founders) tend to look at a lot of secondary indicators: where the person went to school, past companies they've worked for, etc. Instead they should be looking at primary indicators around how they have actually done or might actually do the job. That is much harder to evaluate though, which is why people fall back to secondary indicators.

Without units on these "results" I have, literally, no measure to these implied figure(s) of merit being derived from a specific management style.

Additionally, depending on one's personal perspective and context, the same figures could be wonderful or horrible.

I will proffer, in a prior very successful (angel to S1) org, short (< 15min) skip-level meetings were the norm and it was considered "odd" to even schedule a meeting (outside of all-hands) with more than 2 other people.

Firstly, I’ve never read more generalizations or stereotypes in a PG post. So manager mode is when a person sits at the top of a company, speaks to X direct reports and cares nothing about how they do their job. I’ve never seen anyone successfully manage like this. A skillful manager knows when to dig into ridiculously minute details and when not to.

Secondly, this post says Founders can do some things managers cannot and then listed no examples of what a non-founding leader or manager cannot do. I would think this could be true but mostly based on influence/respect/gravitas.

Thirdly, so when someone tells me to hire good people, why does that result in hiring professional fakers? What? So founders hire professionals and managers hire professional fakers?

Seriously, this post makes no sense and sounds like it’s written by someone who has no idea what a non-founding human does in their job. I think we can all agree that there are good founders and bad founders. In fact, there are many many more bad founders than good, given that most founders don’t get very far - hence the existence of incubators which operate to buy a ton of out of the money options because most will fail. There are also good managers and bad managers. So, have we learned anything here?

Hire good people, let them do their job, trust but verify, override their approach when necessary, dig into details when you need to.

-- Steve Jobs

I agree with Graham about the management mode described being a very bad (trusting “professional” managers and being completely hands off from their responsibilities). And being a founder myself who saw it working first hand at the acquirer of my last company, I see that management in this mode is not worried about the company long term success.

But I’m not sure how founder mode is new or how this is different from what Andy grove suggests in High output management. Among other things, he says that the supervisor should be more or less hands on depending on the “task relevant maturity” of her direct reports.

Maybe by seeing the presentation it would be clearer.

Thanks

The modes don't exist. You either figure out how to effectively manage the company in front of you, or you don't.

First, I don't think Founder Mode works as a name. He's saying all the founders are being told to grow their company the wrong way—the Manager Mode way. Chesky is unique in that he's ignoring them. Most Founders are doing Manager Mode not "Founder" Mode.

It's possible the name could work because it describes what Founders should be doing rather than what they're currently doing. It's meant to capture that people who start a company have a much different interest and emotional investment in the mission and company. This distinction is important (and has been told many times). I'm not sure that model holds so tight anymore. Being a tech founder today is a mainstream and maybe default path today for many, it's not a weird one that you'd have to be crazy about what you're trying to build in order to attempt. Founders are choosing founding first and searching for ideas second, and then pivoting those ideas as a best practice of founding.

Pick a random company that's sent you a recruitment email—look at what they say they do and then ask yourself how many people might be excited about that. Take an interview with a small one, you have a good chance you'll talk to a founder or someone quite high—this person frequently does not seem interested in this. Even without a successful product or an exit, the VC round is paying them a good salary to startup. A recent thought I've been having is there's a little more opportunity now to treat founding as a salary job, not really an equity play.

"As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale." The problematic norm to me in tech is the opting for organizing functionally (dividing into engineering, design, marketing. etc.) to scale. Related to this is the problem with PMs at most companies. If they're good ones, they should be leaders. Yet they don't own much nor manage anyone (they're ICs with no reports). And so Chesky removed them or guided them to something more specific like PMM.

I have knowledge of how management worked in a Musk company, and this "Mini Me" phenomenon was entirely real. People saw how Elon did things, and tried to emulate him at their level. This almost always crushed team dynamics, and led to the least technically capable making important technical decisions.

Elon (eventually) recognizes bs like this and makes those folks walk the plank; but... the damage is done, and must be un-done. There is a cost to allowing "Mini Me"s outsized influence.

What about all those companies operating in founder mode that ended up being a disaster? What about all other companies that transitioned away from founder mode and worked even better afterwards? Both categories are conveniently neglected.

Take Apple for example.

Steve Jobs is mentioned 3 times in the essay. He seems to be the main prototype for a CEO in founder mode for pg.

Yet, in the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Jobs is quoted as saying:

"I am very proud of the many products we have created, but the thing I am most proud of is creating the company that was able to create the products. I think of Apple as the most important work of my life."

This statement reflects Jobs' belief that the culture and company he built at Apple were his greatest achievements, as they allowed for continuous innovation long after any single product launch. And long after his death Apple is still thriving.

So is Apple still in founder mode with Jobs gone or is Apple in a different mode that pg hasn’t recognized?

[1] https://healthio.notion.site/How-Cargo-Cult-Thinking-Nearly-...

The process of fulfilling that vision requires open exploration, a willingness to go places along the way they didn’t expect, and to continue looking ahead.

It isn’t constrained by current products, markets or customers. The memory of how the current company came from something seemingly much less remains fresh.

It is much more of an idiosyncratic winding journey, but potentially more impactful, than iteratively looking for paths that bump numbers.

I built what I wanted and needed. Directed things in the way I wanted them to go. Changed an entire industry.

Don't let MBAs run your company, because they generally only care about the numbers, not about the product. If it's a good product, it sells itself.

Edit: At one point, we brought in a CFO that kept on trying to insist we go another way (advertising.. you just keep chasing that). Maybe we would have made more money that way, but now the profit is at 4x expenses

These businesses usually don't grow that much, but they are very stable over time, even across economic downturns, because the owners/founders think long term.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand

I am curious, though, if anyone knows some more of the specifics that Chesky shared about the "disasters" that resulted from the bad advice he followed in the past. I ask because I've seen two bad, but very different, scenarios:

1. One is to hire really smart people and just "let them loose", but without overarching guidance or direction. While I got burned by this model in a past job in my own career, I think a good well-known example of this currently is Google's "WTFs" around product management, i.e. lots of products launching with fanfare then get killed shortly thereafter, bizarre and confusing product naming schemes (Google Wallet/Android Wallet/GPay/Google Pay anyone? I honestly don't even remember), new product launches but then old, easily fixable bugs/feature requests that languish for years.

2. The other model, which is more of what PG seems to be hinting at, is the "John Sculley" model, i.e. treating employees like to interchangeable widgets, thinking of your org structure as black boxes with only specific interface points, etc.

That is, I've seen both of these models fail, but in very different ways, so I'm curious what happened at AirBnB.

In Joel Spolsky's blog about his Excel review by Bill Gates. Gates knew enough about Excel/123 and company to make sure if the person knows what he is talking about. Same can be said for 6-page memo culture of Amazon.

But even assuming you can get good people in the door, the problem with giving them room is that you’re often creating something static and giving them ownership of it. When the world suddenly turns sideways and potential needs to flow through multiple people’s fiefdoms, at the very least you’ve created a lot of friction, but at worst you’ve erected impenetrable walls. That these problems can often only be solved by founders isn’t a surprise: when you create a a top down structure that doesn’t work, you can only fix it from the top. It’s exceedingly hard to delegate the one power that matters, which is the ability to reshape the business rather than optimise parts of it. If you can work out how to scale that without conflict then you can probably solve world peace while you’re at it.

- emotionally involved - visionary or pioneering - optimistic - gritty or determined - domain experienced - competitive - strong negotiators - strong communicators - self-starting (priority setters) - intuitive, and - self-assured (perceived experts)

I'm sure others will disagree with this list inone way or another, but I have mentored, counseled and invested in startups for 15 years; I have dozens of friends who started companies; and I founded a successful company myself. Most if not all of these characteristics are present in the founders I know who have been successful.

If you want to start a business, and you are not a person well described by these characteristics--then my advice is to get more work experience and find opportunities (in or out of work) to develop these characteristics in yourself.

When the time comes for you to talk with investors--let alone the need for these skills to found your startup--these are the qualifications and qualities in you that they will be looking for.

What is the essence of Steve Jobs' management style?

As a multiple-time founder and also someone who post-founding has worked in the C-Suite from small to midsize companies, what I usually see are founders with narrow skillsets and little to no developmental pathway to improve beyond their core skills. Helicoptering is frequent and at times, very destructive because Founder Mode requires significant interpersonal skills the larger that organizations get. "Micromanaging" is often seen as "telling me how to do my job even if you have no idea how to do my job". And if your VC wants you to scale significantly, there really aren't a lot of good examples of Founder Mode doing that, but there are indeed a lot of examples of non Founder Mode doing it and a huge ecosystem/culture that supports it.

If tech is trying to make changes that impact another major business area, and chaos needs to be avoided, then if you want to avoid executives being involved then members of that org need to be empowered to agree on those changes. However if you do that without structure it’s easy to just end up with organizational chaos as you wind up massively multiplying the communication channels that need to be pushed lower in the org. Someone needs to limit and direct the people responsible for those decisions if they’re not going to make them themselves.

That doesn't stop people trying.

But in researching this, it’s all pretty ambiguous but a decently relevant HBR article came out of it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150209203853/https://hbr.org/2...

The quote does say "I" so there is an inherent assumption there. The problem with taking any quote and "best practice" at face value that can be applied anywhere is always incorrect.

> There's a few Steve Jobs quotes which have tanked the tech industry.

So hence it's like the hype trains an social media driven development. People need to think. Don't blame Jobs for it.

Unless your company is a baseball team

Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :) You probably can't afford the best, you probably don't need the best, you probably can't keep the best happy, you definitely don't have problems that need the best.

That being said if you pay dollars instead of pennies you can find some decent folks and maybe save some money in the long run :)

Please explain how it is a meme-stock in 2024 and what that even means? What's the definition? Like how is GameStop not a "real" stock or "real" company?

It has 4 billion cash on hand (for 10B market cap company), no debt and is profitable. It had NONE of that before RC bought himself in. How is that a declining company? Or how does this fall under "not much seems to be changing"?

Also "every positive thing that happened to the company, can be credited to the pumping of the stock" makes no sense at all. 3 of the 4 billion cash on hand was from stock offerings that happened this year. On 0 news. Every single spike in the past 3 years was on 0 news. You can keep blaming "pumping", that's fine. But you'll have to specify who's doing the pumping and why to make that statement have any meaning. It's unlikely that household investors are doing 100+ million volume A DAY in a company that issued around 300 million stocks total (referring to the 300%+ spike days this year on 0 news).

This general problem has so very many guises! Delegation affords so much, but trust sure is tricky. (This even applies recursively to, say, taking advice from anyone who "seems to" have studied all there is to know about abstraction/modularity or "human delegation optimization" which is, basically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem.) It may be the single most central problem of the human condition and is probably a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem .

More directly related to the article, one main impediment is that humans are sneaky & tricky enough that if fakery is incentivized (it almost always is -- due to the thermodynamics of doing vs. faking), then this informs the viability of whatever Rules / protocols you try to establish. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch does a better job at extending the conversation than I ever could in an HN comment.

Manager mode is utter BS. MBA books and management coaching teaches people to occupy a higher position in the org chart and to define rules, bureaucracy, and measurement of whatever they are managing. Tech companies have a perverted form of this where IC track and manager track are separate - so managers are only defining rules, bureaucracy, and measurement of people - stack ranking them.

Of course this method is flawed. We all inherently feel so. But no one asks why this is flawed. It is flawed because MBA-style box management is trying to impose boxes - which is orthogonal to innovation. Innovation literally means thinking/doing work outside the box.

As an example, lets say that your 10 layers of management has hired a whole bunch of innovators but then said that they will be stack ranked against each other every 6 months based on criterias and hiring committees. This is a BOX - that is preventing ANY work that may require working OUTSIDE THE CONFINES OF THE BOX.

Imagine a situation where a project is at 6 months performance review BOX boundary but still needs 2 weeks of slow rollout to ensure it doesn't crash on customers. In FOUNDER mode, the team is encouraged to take those 2 weeks to ensure that customers get a good experience - because it matters. In BOX management mode, these 2 weeks are going to appear as a fail for the stack rank committee gods. The nuance of the 2 weeks is lost. Instead, the management chain will ensure that the stack rank is executed perfectly - thus causing the people WHO CARED about the service and customers to depart - voluntarily or involuntarily.

Ultimately, NO ONE is happy with the BOX management mode of work. Employees feel like their work and insight is undervalued, C-Suite is unhappy about causing customer issues, teams are unhappy because the BOX is hurting morale and causing sabotagey environments. The only people who seem to be ok with this is the 10 layers of BOX managers whose entire existence depends on perfect execution of the BOX.

https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-differ...

https://hbr.org/2016/06/do-managers-and-leaders-really-do-di...

https://hbr.org/2022/09/the-best-managers-are-leaders-and-vi...

Almost every HBR "Must Read" series on enterprise management says the same thing as this blog post. The business world has been talking about this stuff since the 90s.

> It could make a big company feel like a startup

Nope, not true in my book. I would not like to be in any company that "selects" a small group of elites to a hawaii or las-vegas "retreat". then, said elites would propagate their new-found retreat wisdom from their cult-leader down to the plebs.

Whether or not you are a founder, if your strengths tend toward understanding the business domain and implementation, then you probably should lean more hands on. If your strengths lean more towards the management side, then hiring strong people to manage parts of the company.

Of course, which works better is very company and culture dependent. Larger conglomerates that don’t have a focused mission probably shouldn’t have leaders that aren’t geared toward that.

That might be personal bias, but I think the idea that PG is developing here already stem a lot in the Agile movement (not the software one, the general one). The problem is that, as PG mention, there is probably not one founder mode, but more like a set of them. This makes their academic description harder to conceive.

Companies hiring the wrong team members may well be the bigger problem. Plenty of companies succeed by building great teams. Plenty fail by hiring the grifter class.

I do agree that CEO/founders need to learn that being "in" the business is required longer than expected.

The board members and initial contacts have much to do with the initial clients and the network effect it creates. It doesn’t matter if you have an excellent product. Without the initial boost of early adopters, you’ll struggle to survive. That’s why many founders go to SV or well-known startup incubators: the networking it creates is priceless. Of course, you’ll need to create a valuable product -and that’s the problem of many opportunistic startups leveraging current trends. Many startup pieces of advice I read seem to ignore the fact that you need money and contacts to have visibility in the right places (SV, elite university/circle).

While Paul Graham is a legend and I look forward to learning from his experiences, I believe that people in a position of privilege tend to overlook the advantages that come with their position.

For example, it is true that Steve Jobs started in a garage. However, both Apple founders were living in the epicenter of computing companies at the time. They both worked at HP and had contacts with people at Stanford. If you had built a personal computer in a garage in Latin America at that time, it would have been like a tree falling in the middle of nowhere.

I think truth seeking is more important than any particular mode of operation. Founders are more likely to do this because they genuinely want to win the entire game, not just Q3.

I think I've already seen a few managers walking around in founder's garb. Again, these people are professional liars. They're going to be hard to spot unless you're looking for it.

My next venture will probably involve unconditional dictatorship with hair trigger termination policies for deceptive behavior. Until then, I'll be working smaller contract jobs and otherwise scraping by.

Paul Graham here claims that C-level types are all professional liars and that the ideas behind standard management strategy is worthless. I agree. Where I disagree is the idea that founders are any different. They are just a different flavor of the same thing. This concept of founders mode is just another nice-sounding theory that can never be proved, that makes for captivating talks and blog posts and eventually management books but will fail to produce anything with any kind of consistency. It’s the yet another cargo-cult trend for the group desperate to prove they are the next Steve Jobs.

I’m not even sure I buy into the Steve Jobs mythos. Every random process will have statistical outliers for no other reason than randomness, but hey become canonized and their words and lives are studied like scripture and we try to divine the path to emulate them. Many of us understand that top performing hedge fund managers are statistical flukes that are getting lucky rather than systemically beating the market. But we hold out against the idea that startups and founders are a similarly chaotic system. I wonder if it’s because this is a forum for startups and not hedge funds?

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

It is really hard to put in practice because of all the gravitational pull towards mediocrity.

though, to be fair he said it would take a year to do so: https://x.com/paulg/status/1830300111232188626?s=46&t=8sSeDI...

I'd be very interested to compare notes. I'm username at alphabet's service.

I’m starting to think paying attention to what is happening is undervalued.

As with any complex system, you have to be careful about degrees of freedom, too many and it can break down and too little and it can get seized.

But in my experience a good founder doesn’t necessarily make a good leader. Not a CEO anyway, but it depends on the role of the CEO. If the the CEO is “chief strategy and opportunity officer” then some founders are often quite well suited to it.

But we should bear in mind that all founders do not have the same skill set. Woz was also a founder of Apple and a great engineer but not a CEO.

I think the founder not only motivates people to work on the correct thing by doing this, but the founder also directly experiences feedback from working with people lower on the org chart, enabling them to steer the company with more accurate information.

That makes sense.

Being C level exec in another firm does not guarantee success. In fact, it might even be a dismerit for a startup.

anyone find this talk he's referring to?

Those are two very different things.

Look to Oracle as an example of a “founder mode” company that is not founder led.

First, Tim O'Reilly wrote a superlative piece in 2013, "How I Failed."[0] I cannot recommend this piece highly enough, and it had enormous impact on me as a founder. Its message is quite a bit more complicated than the Graham piece: there are times to stand your ground and resist conventional wisdom (HR in O'Reilly's piece), and there are times when expert practitioners of that conventional wisdom will save your bacon (the CFO in O'Reilly's piece). And the truth is more complicated still in that O'Reilly's specifics may or may not be the ones that a founder needs to apply to their own situation.

Second -- and I recommend this whenever anyone mentions Jobs -- is Randall Stross's "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing"[1], a history of NeXT written at Jobs' darkest hour. An extraordinary book that will leave you with a much more nuanced view of Jobs: not only in terms of his strengths (definitely those!) and his weaknesses (here in spades!) but especially the way that the NeXT experience surely informed Jobs's (much more successful) return to Apple. (It is a galling failure of the Issacson biography that he spends so little time on NeXT.) Selfishly, I would also recommend our Oxide and Friends discussion of the book.[2]

Third (and finally): a very common specific mistake that technical founders make is how they build out a go-to-market team. This isn't discussed nearly enough, and I was on a podcast episode of Software Misadventures ("Ditching the Rules to Build a Team that Lasts"[3]) with my own co-founder (who came up on the go-to-market side) in which he elaborates on this mistake -- and how founders can avoid it.

[0] https://www.oreilly.com/radar/how-i-failed/

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316

[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-object...

[3] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/oxide-ditching-the-rules

Throughout my career I've seen a lot of managers willfully focus more on crafting a narrative of "everything is fine" than fixing problems -- usually by hiding and mismeasuring known problem areas for example. At first I thought those were bad apples, but I came to realize those managers' managers are perfectly content with this type of dishonesty, because they get credit if it's not caught, and can wash their hands of it if they have plausible deniability.

So multiple times I see a founding team who's utterly sincere, and then a huge management chain that believes in nothing, couldn't care less about customers, and treats the whole job as a game/performance, and some very sincere engineers. And I just think to myself... "How does the C level not see this?"

Most professional managers are BS artists. Perhaps Chesky hired of bunch of those. The conclusion is not to run everything yourself, but maybe hire better managers.

A late stage founder or a professional manager ceo has amassed stuff that they can lose more easily than stuff they potentially can gain. To continue to behave in the same way, they must be willing to take a lot of risk. And a lot of normal people don't want to take such risks.

Only really crazy people – be it a founder or a professional manager – will disregard game theory dynamics and work against their own apparent self-interest and take huge risks. And they tend to expect people around them to take similar huge risks along with them. We call them unreasonable people. And only really unreasonable people can make huge changes in society. This is by definition true because only such people will behave in an outlier manner, and if they do so with a huge amount of capital and power in their control, they can change societies in big ways. If we think that is working well, we celebrate them; and if we think it is horrible, we write cautionary tales about them. It is possible to have both perceptions to be held by different groups of people at the same time.

All the rest about hiring good people and letting them do etc is all just details of dynamics emanating from this unreasonable risk taking ability a person can manifest. I don't believe this can be turned into a playbook that can be taught in a management school. Management schools already teach how to take risks such that downside doesn't befall on the person who went to management school and instead falls on others. Everyone can subconsciously sense this about MBAs and hence the reaction they get. As companies become big and have a lot of external players with skin in the game (aka stakeholders) who are at a distance, they want these MBA types to manage that risk in such a way that it doesn't befall them. That's fundamentally very different from a founder who is not at a distance, but within. Still, founders also do the same when it is them vs their employees. In this aspect, it is all relative.

Another rebuke is how the communist party filled a religious or even feudal void to some extent - Lenin's tomb in Red Square being a perfect example. I can assure you that though the Politburo felt that was a needed measure, they did feel a bit silly and embarrassed about having to do it.

Why was all of this felt necessary within the Politburo? The answer is simple, in fact the answer is somewhat answered in this essay, if parallels are allowed for. Before the revolution, all revolutionaries were true believers who faced prison, exile and death fighting against impossible odds for years and decades. Those who join the party after the success of the revolution are always feared to be the parallel of the middle manager MBA managing up. A Gorbachev, a Yeltsin. The cadre around Deng Xiaoping who reversed his purge from the party and then put him in power.

A very different circumstance, but in many ways analogous.

Interestingly, the most successful managers I've seen have themselves been founders. They had both autonomy and organizational trust, and also tenacious creativity, which led to significant successes. This binary notion of "are you a Manager™ or are you a Founder™?" is a false dichotomy and leaves great people out.

A founder mentality has certain recognizable characteristics: doing whatever it takes to succeed, applying creative solutions to challenging problems, going outside your lane to win, and putting in energy well beyond the standard 9-5 expected of a standard employee. You can hire talented people with such qualities AND build an organization with trust and autonomy. Bringing it back to Chesky's disastrous results with delegation, I'd ask this: Did he just hire bad people?

This dichotomy may at worst cause an entire generation of new founders to ignore really fantastic advice, "Hire really great people, and give them the support and space to succeed." This is not antithetical to: "Oh, and those people should look like founders." It's a Both, not One-or-the-Other.

All this said, I do think PG is touching on something super interesting, which is an almost anthropological understanding of "The Founder", and view that as a very important area of discourse and study for the next generation of great companies.

The point that both PG and BC are really trying to say is that rigid, hierarchical employee types are detrimental to company's long-term success, and instead you should be building your team with hungry, bright, and creative problemsolvers who aren't afraid to break artificial rules to succeed. But you sure as hell be building an organization with trust and giving those founder-types everything they need to succeed.

A lot, I mean a lot of people with middle incomes have bought desirable homes in nice locations and rent them out. There are many aspiring families, young couples priced out of the market because of this.

Sure, this option was always a thing but the people who rent these properties out do not improve the community or unit they purchased and they rent out to anyone. This weekend a Airbnb guest kicked my door front door open. I pulled a gun on him and he apologized and said he was messing around but I wouldn’t have to deal with this if I didn’t live near short term rentals.

Hotels needed a check to their power but I’m not sure if 15 years from now Airbnb will have been good for the median person. It sure helps the wealthy however.

No. The hierarchy works. There are two key things most managers miss. Learn the skill of hiring and firing well and (perhaps more importantly) incentivize them properly.

Most startups fail. So they commonly get advice about how not to fail. Most of them still fail. That doesn't mean the advice was bad. Founders are gamblers and the odds suck.

If founders weren't looking for someone to tell them how to run their businesses or trying to rid themselves of their pesky responsibilities, this situation would be different. But that's a story that most founders don't want to hear.

I think, for once, pg is dead-on with this post, and I'm glad it's being brought to light. Too many managers and founders live in fear of the dreaded "micromanager" label and stand back and watch their companies turn to crap.

The thing is - if you have a vision for what's needed to make your product or company truly successful and the people working for you aren't hitting the mark, you have to get in the trenches and make it work.

Here's the dreaded scenario:

Your company is working on a new product (or a new version or whatever) and you, the stalwart CEO, have left it to your team to build without getting too into the mix lest you be labeled a micromanager. It's not going in the right direction and for whatever reason it's not hitting the mark.

Do you have the cajones to tell the team to go back to the drawing board, even if your delegated manager thinks it's going well? The launch will be late, the team will be annoyed ("Damn that CEO getting into our business again"). I bet a lot of CEOs don't, and this is why companies turn to crap over time. pg's point here is that the CEO needs to be willing to think like a startup CEO and be willing to go into founder mode and get his or her hands dirty to make sure the product nails it.

This is hard but necessary!

Groups of people that work together share a common purpose, that is aligned with the individual purposes of all the people that make up the group. A great leader helps remind people that they can cooperate and all win, and uses the clear purpose to cut through bullshit. There are few people in the world that can do this.

What's the definition of 'good people' in the sense that nobody knowingly hires 'bad' people. And to my other points (below) how is someone with (very very generally) no actual business experience (or very little ie in or out of college) supposed to know if someone is good (or just faking it even with embelished references) if they don't themselves have an idea of what 'good' is? (Also how well they are able to read people.

> You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.

If you are a startup founder typically you wouldn't be able to anyway because a) You don't know their job and b) You actually don't know that much about business (or operating one) to begin with.

> judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them dr ive the company into the ground.

To my first point because they don't know enough don't have enough actual experience to even know how to vet someone. Welcome to the business world where actual time in business does make a difference.

> Steve presumably wouldn't have kept having these retreats if they didn't work. But I've never heard of another company doing this.

While Steve might have had other reasons for keeping the retreats the fact that PG has never heard of another company doing it could just be because Paul only reads what he reads AND not every company talks about things they do in a public way.

For all his problems, my example of this would be Elon Musk and SpaceX. He learned about the space industry and identified the constraint keeping the space industry down. Every launch provider was trying to maximize the performance of their rockets. To maximize performance each rocket was basically a bespoke work of art, this made rockets expensive, which lead to high costs, which reduced the number of customers. Musk chose to make a rocket that did NOT maximize performance, instead focused on reducing the cost of each launch. The most expensive part of a rocket are the engines, so SpaceX focused on making Merlin engines at low cost. Rockets are expensive, why are they thrown away? To maximize performance. Since SpaceX had already abandoned maximizing performance at all costs, the opportunity to reuse rockets became clear. Use leftover fuel margin to attempt to land and reuse the rockets.

Once Musk believed SpaceX's reuse was going to work. He moved onto a new major constraint, customers. SpaceX did not and does not have enough customers for the launch volume they are able to support. They looked at the opportunities and decided that a large constellation of satellites providing fast internet access in LEO would be profitable if launches were now cheaper. So SpaceX created Starlink to take up launch volume.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/111457691.cms...

This is a great talk by Brian on why he is CEO, he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about designers not being CEOs from what I gathered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6h_EDcj12k

whether 'an inconsistent superstar is not as good as an individual with a consistently fresh solution' depends on the situation. if you're in a situation where that's true, you're not looking for superstars, and you shouldn't try to intrude your decision criteria into discussions about people who are

> I believe anyone has the capability of being a superstar in the right environment

that's, i'm sorry, just bullshit. the wrong environment can prevent you from being a superstar—imagine if madonna had been born before recorded music, or in taliban-governed afghanistan—but the reverse is obviously false. no environment could have converted me, this body, into madonna or messi or jimi hendrix or bruce lee or meryl streep or jeff dean. that's pure wishful thinking

i don't think the discussion is about how to have a stable organization of any kind. it's about how a startup can kick ass. to what extent stability promotes that is a point under debate, not a premise we have stipulated. i can tell you that there is some degree of chaos that makes kicking ass impossible, but from experience, it can be remarkably high, and stability inevitably trades off against chasing superstars. that's because superstars are unpredictable by nature—not just when they fail but also when they succeed! a new product line that obsoletes everything your startup has done so far is a lot of instability, and it's what you are hoping for if you are trying to hire superstars in a startup

ignoring that is just self-deception, and trying to impose obviously ridiculous redefinitions on the conversation in order to cover it up doesn't do the discussion any service. if you want to argue that chasing superstars is a dumb idea, which is a reasonable point of view and correct in many situations, then make that argument—don't try to redefine common terms to conceal the disagreement

as you know, though, there is a connection between this kind of security and garbage collection. specifically, if you're using a language that bounds-checks all array accesses, so array overruns are impossible, but relies on that same application programmer to free pointers manually, you can have a use-after-free bug, where a function pointer is written into heap space previously occupied by an array (or other data structure) to which a pointer still exists. if the attacker can cause writes to happen via that pointer, they can still break your security

garbage collection is a perfect guarantee against use-after-free bugs, unless of course the garbage collector is buggy. it's not the only possible solution; alternative solutions include statically allocating everything (abjuring dynamic allocation completely, like cobol), linear typing, never deallocating anything, and mlkit's region-based memory allocation are some alternatives which have been used. garbage collection is the most popular and probably the most practical

so it's not just that we have thousands of applications use the same debugged low-level buffer manipulation routines. it's also that we have thousands of applications use the same debugged garbage collector

i want to point out that even without having code and data in the same memory space, there are a variety of things an attacker may be able to do. when non-executable stacks, aslr, and w^x protections started being implemented, attackers started returning into libc; function pointers that point into the middle of libc would work just as well. (return-oriented programming might be more difficult, unless the thing being used-after-freeing was a large stack-allocated variable, which would be unusual.) and of course if there are shell commands, sql commands, java bytecode, or the like in data memory, overwriting them with malicious data may be just as good as uploading malicious machine code

Here's what we say on our jobs page [1] - strongly inspired by Chesky + Gumroad + nordic office culture:

> We operate with a fairly flat hierarchy and operate with high trust of each other. The code, copy, or designs you make will often go straight to production with little discussion or modification. Everybody is welcome to give their opinions, inputs, and ideas on the product.

> Our style of work isn't for everybody. You have a lot of freedom in how to work, but not a lot of freedom in what to work on. There isn't much mentorship, community, or discussion. If you need help, we're quick to respond and help - but if we don't hear from you, we assume things are going well.

On the footnote about "Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse" - a learning I've had is the importance of operating with a high degree of trust within this system. I set the objective but then can't focus too closely on the tactics. So, I shouldn't second-guess the libraries an engineer decides to use when building a ticket.

"Founder mode" only works if you can modulate where you make decisions. You need to grant some autonomy to people in making their own decisions. That's not to say that the Founder can't override somebody on something detailed like a button label - but those should be about setting the bar for quality of execution, not putting yourself in the critical path of everything. Founders should focus on the decisions that matter, not being a gatekeeper for every little change.

[1] https://usefind.ai/jobs

That’s it, folks. As always, the devil’s in the details, not the Startup School maxims.

As Ed Catmull said, (lightly paraphrased) “everyone says story is everything, even if their story is drek…once you reduce an idea to a concise phrase you can use it without risk of changing behavior. What really matters is, what are you going to do about it?”

The whole idea of this article hinges on this sentence. What disasterous thing happened exactly? Considering the premise seems to be missing, dare I say, this article seems to rhetorical.

In other words, "founder mode" worked after a failure of "manager mode".

Yet, would Apple even had continued to exist to this day had Steve not been fired?

From the essay, one thing is obvious, "founder mode" looks very different for a 20 person company than it does for a 2000 person company.

> Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. They'll even vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples of individual founders groping their way toward it.

The question that I have is, "is it possible for a founder to discover what 'founder mode' is for a 2000 person company, without going through some form of 'manager mode' as the company scaled from 20 to 2000"?

What would be even more interesting is comments from founders/employees of startups where "founder mode" persisted as the company scaled up from 20 employees. Were these companies successful? Do they continue operating successfully?

I think what founders know, but what managers do not, is the formula. They're missing one of the key components. The perspective of your customer (what their business is, and the understanding of what is and what isn't important to them), and an understanding of how to deliver it (what capabilities does your customer have, how do they like to do business), and finally a perspective on how to deliver that value (an expertise in product).

Many people are experts at "delivering" or they're experts at understanding their customers PoV, or they're experts at understanding how to do business with those customers. VERY FEW "professionals" have all 3... but you can tell a great story to other non-experts using only 2 of the points, and making up a reasonable sounding point for #3. Or worse, they become experts on selling to YOU (the founder) how to do these things.

So what is the alternative to top down? Another model is that the persons in an organization act in two roles. First they effectuate. They take effective action. The people 'in situ' know what the situation is. Secondly they act as sensors. They provide information to others. And groups can act in the same way.

We humans evolved by being very good at this model. There were no CEO's in small communities. There were no schools that taught you how to be a hunter gatherer or make cheese.

Yes I know that large corporations and armies have in the past scaled better. Perhaps that is because we have had better technology to give orders better than to collaborate.

The (mythical) Mythical Man Month tells us that New York City cannot exist. And no corporation runs NYC. So clearly it cannot exist. Right? Yet it does. Perhaps we need to understand how. My attempts have started with 'Hidden Order' by John Holland. Don't follow it. Just use it as a starting point.

It also often causes (or is caused by) eccentric behavior (or mental issues) - but it's been done since forever, and when it's successful, we call it "visionary." When it's not, we call it "toxic."

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. It won't be the same "good" as the next person, and definitely not the same "good" as larger corporations with different histories.

Teaching founder mode sounds as simple as teaching creativity or how to be an individual. Founders are most likely are made up of people divergent of social thinking in some way and have a non-verbal need inside trying to get out.

Founder mode is fed by an intense focus, desperation, and insight. Which are all difficult to teach.

The whole thing feels off to me. Isn't the VCs that try to stop Founder mode. I think SV has a slew of carcasses of companies that founder modeded to death.

Us “fakers” get 0.1% if we’re lucky and then pg writes an essay saying we’re not trying hard enough. We are.

This philosophy of involvement follows through the entire org structure not just from CEO to the farthest position down the org tree.

Let's not let this be a rug to sweep poorly-behaving founders behavior's under, as there are plenty of those out there (key: successful founders).

Jensen Huang (Nvidia) engages with only direct reports.

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.”

I like to jokingly call founder mode: "fine-grained multi-level oversight". Others might call it the derogatory "micromanagement".

That doesn't mean I control every decision, or that I don't give people space to be creative. What it means is: for whatever is most important for the business, I get involved with the details. The goal is that when I move out of that area, the team I worked with is able to operate closer to founder mode than when I started.

The issue is that vision fundamentally can't be communicated by telephone, or all at once. You're trying to get to a point on the map that most people can't see. The path to it is the integration of all of the tiny decisions everyone makes along the way.

If you only course correct from the highest level you'll never get there.

AMD was successful in some ways in those days, and unsuccessful in others, so I'm not sure what conclusion to draw here, except that it wasn't so unique for Steve Jobs to have contact with the lower ranks in order to get feedback from outside his bubble.

PG did not go far enough here. The problem isn't 'bad advice', the problem is that advice is no substitute for thinking. Neither is looking at what Steve Jobs did at Apple for that matter: what really works is to think about all of this, considering problems from multiple angles.

However, as Bertrand Russel said:

“Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!”

Which also applies to businesses!

   Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.

    The so-called common sense is common sense that ordinary people do not have. When we say that someone has common sense, we are actually saying that he has common sense that ordinary people do not have. People think that it is easy to have common sense, but in fact it is very difficult.

If this really is the way founders describe it, it sounds more like a blame game: I, as the founder, was successful on my own when the company was small; now I have organised the company into a kind of small sub-companies that are not as successful; ergo, the pseudo-founders I hired for these sub-companies are impostors.

Rather, I think that we are "simply" dealing with fundamental management problems that have nothing to do with whether a company is relatively new or a century old, or run by a founder or run by a manager. It is more about size and managing innovation on a large scale, the flow of information and, to borrow terms from the military, a well-balanced command and control between strategic, operational and tactical levels.

That is another profound truth that's just lost entirely. Data is not information. And information is not data (reality). We must have the ability to both "see" the real data and also recognize the translation of that data into information to make good choices. The more layers in your org, the harder it is without feedback mechanisms that allow the bottom, reality-facing side of your org to pass on critical stuff without the interpretation and loss of middle-layers. Remember, you are an org too, a 37-trillion cell org that coheres as one in such a beautiful way you think of yourself as one "I" Long way before we find principles that allow us to do the same with companies and countries.

1) loss of control when hiring a professional manager without intrusion to sub organization, because you rely on the manager provided information. If the manager is not straightforward, the sub organization may become a black box, where issues can go unseen

2) Lack of access to the frontline people and their understanding, which is opened by the Jobs like key people meeting across the org

3) Id also imagine that if you have a founder with deep domain knowledge, who has worked across all aspects of business, going fully hands off with the details, and replacing decision makers with more generic managers potentially from other industries, means that lot of expertise gets disconnected from the relevant decisions.

Ultimately the outcomes are all about the decisions and the decisions are all about understanding, which is all about the information. As such, it's not surprising if cutting the seasoned founder from both key mid level decisions and the firsthand information flows brings disadvantages.

I'd over all interpret the article to be about how hands on the founder should be about the different aspects of the business rather than the leadership, as implied elsewhere

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.

I would instead split on the employee: are they in a competitive position where 1) direct performance can be evaluated directly, and 2) multiple other people have a substitutable role and can thus fill in for any deficiencies / blind spots? Or instead is the employee’s seat a functional internal monopoly, where they have exclusive control over some key resource or process.

If it’s the former: management is trivial because evaluation is trivial and deficiencies don’t spread. But the latter case requires extreme vigilance from the CEO. This category encompasses all middle management. This vigilance cannot be delegated because the roles reporting to the CEO are definitionally the most susceptible to rent-seeking.

The challenge is that a portion of people in the first spot will always seek to maneuver into the second spot.

Is there a recording? It's very frustrating to read things like this and not be given a link.

Have you tried Residence Inn 2-bedroom suites?

There aren’t many of them in any given location, but they are absolutely amazing for 4 people when you can get one.

My experience has been positive, and my friends and family who have tried it were also impressed.

I'm the technical co-founder. Under me, we have three squads. Two of them are led by managers who were promoted internally from individual contributor roles. These managers still do some hands-on coding occasionally when needed, but they primarily focus on delegating tasks to their teams as much as possible. The third squad has a manager without coding responsibilities, whom we hired to test a new squad structure. It's been going really well—his squad is performing excellently, and I've been able to delegate some cross-functional tasks that used to fall on me, like collaborating with the sales team when clients have technical requirements for renewing their accounts or documenting releases and bug fixes to share within the company.

So in terms of the technology area of our company, our lower-level managers are performing considerably well. We’re implementing frameworks and routines that are really helping to advance our company’s managerial maturity. We’re also working to apply these practices to other, less structured areas, so your proposal could be very timely.

You don’t really believe that, do you?

Lots of people are just tuned out. And just don't care. With or without the comp.

>>It comes back to the work itself being interesting and whether you actually care about the field that you are working in.

There was this HR in a company here in India. She spoke at length about what attracted people to IT. Basically the employees wanted the realisation that they were creating tremendous value for the company, at the same time earning very high, and of course wanted work life balance. It was more or less impossible to achieve this. There aren't even enough projects of substance to make this happen. At least not for everyone, all the time. The net result was people tuned out, or just don't involve themselves enough at their work, or associate the outcome of their work at personal level.

Another additional factor how quickly the product/projects get shut down/eol in our industry. There are not many things that last for years that you take pride building them.

And there's a difference between working with curing cancer or optimizing people wasting money in Candy Crush

The extreme conservatism employed by managers to prevent failure - can only be summed up as "success at any cost". The consequence is decisions that spread the pain far and wide.

Unfortunately, these managers are not accountable for these consequences.

It's no winder that solutions take longer, cost more, are sub-optimal at almost every level. Furthermore, they very painful for the poeple who have to suffer these solutions. But hey, some unrelated manager-chain can claim success.

The worst of it is, these managers rinse-and-repeat at their next gig!

-- It may well be that, beyond the obvious, it depends on the broader social (how society is structured) and financial context, and the spirit of the times. The same could be said of all sorts of "how to's": how to get rich, how to be successful in life (the vagueness of which already throws a wrench into the engine of exploration), how to win at soccer/football/whatever sport or skill you are interested in.

While technology may open new horizons with capabilities that were not there before (think 4G and true mobile internet experience), one might ask why, looking back at the "primitive" ways sports were trained for and played 50 years ago, nobody had the intuition to propose ways of training and playing that are closer to what we see today. It did not require new technology, it needed a different way of thinking about the problem. But what scientific research, such as the one you propose to use to study how organizations win, would have allowed this thinking to emerge? And the same will probably be pondered 50 years from now when their ways will be compared to ours.

The CEO got a really good exit package from Softbank.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann#Business_career

No more fuss and endless mess,

Mind at ease, clear skies.

Yep, just look at 3M for instance. They were already an established chemical manufacturer, but they could afford to have some people spend their time investing adhesives. One of these was a total failure for the desired application (they wanted a strong adhesive for aerospace, they got a weak but reusable adhesive), but then they spent more time looking for applications for this, and now everyone and his dog uses 3M Post-It Notes.

Someone recently hinted at the opposite angle: Give them a lot of money and their motives would move to safeguarding their jobs, which results in a higher level of corporate politics.

Why would I grind at a startup where the best case scenario I am getting a payout I could get at FAANG without any of the risk?

I have been through a successful exit as a SWE and you can be sure that the founders did everything in their power to maximize their own payout and minimize my payout. In a company of 40 the founders got a payout of 100x any other individual at the company, even those who were there early on and stayed until the exit. I got a (taxable) payout of ~300k and the founders got 40mil. The money was life changing for the founders, but for everyone else it was just a nice bonus.

Now I just work at BigCo and make 400k/yr, every year.

The photon came after, for instance.

For comparison, I can tell a MacBook is better than a Windows laptop in 100 different ways. I can tell that the touch screen UI and self driving features in a Tesla is 15 years ahead a Toyota, but I cannot tell Netflix is better than its competitors.

Yeah, international media content licensing is very likely Netflix's moat. I'd wager starting a streaming service, and getting the big studios to host their content is pretty much impossible.

Recommender systems are pretty well studied, and anyways, I'm sure it's significance for Netflix is overrated. People (including me) tend to watch the show everyone's talking about. It's a much more hairy issue for a site like Youtube, where users upload decades worth of content every day, and the site has to figure out what to show to which viewers, where the content's shelf-life might be measured in days, so building up collaborative filtering data might not be feasible.

All the other technical issues are probably non-trivial, but I don't think any of them requires world-changing engineering prowess.

Most engineering is non-trivial. If I attempted to design a washing machine, I'd probably fail miserably, and figuring how to do it well probably took collectively thousands of engineer-years. Doesn't mean it requires exclusively unicorn engineers.

Right, but on the other side, in the military they told us: "You can delegate authority, but you can't delegate responsibility." If part of the CEO is to be a manager for the C-suite, then he needs to be able to evaluate how the CxO is behaving as a manager; and that would seem to imply looking 2 or 3 levels down to see what's going on beneath them.

That's not to say the CEO should go around randomly countermanding orders and giving new ones. The CxO can't do their job that way. But it does mean that the CEO should have a clear picture about what's going on, form their own opinions, and either give guidance / constructive criticism or fire where appropriate.

Yeah, typical corporate development, where often the smallest of changes can be a nightmare:)

Ray Dalio describes these people as "Shapers", and maybe using a new term is the right way to go.

So putting this term to work, Paul's point is that the best way to run a company when the leader is a shaper isn't going to be the same as when the leader isn't a shaper. And to your point not all founders are Shapers and not all Shapers are founders.

> Objectively, original post had little to no details in it to link it to any kind of typology.

And nobody suggested that it did.

> predict the outcomes in any way.

And nobody suggested that it did.

> MBTI > pseudo-science > hindsight bias

Ok, you do you.

that's not to say the goal should always be to scale or become as big as possible, but it's interesting to think about.

"Pay excellent people out of band, for example." why not fix the band ?

So everyone picks what will look good on their resume in a few years, not what actually solves the issue in the most optimal way possible.

I’m not convinced this is necessarily true. JIT implies making all of your buffers more obvious, and you will want to reduce unnecessary buffers to save cost, but maintaining some buffers for the sake of resilience isn’t incompatible with JIT supply chains. The problem comes when you combine short-term oriented management with JIT supply chains; if you quantify the cost of a buffer, you make it easier for that type of management to make that kind of decision.

Toyota, for example, is one of the firms that popularized JIT, but they don’t usually run into the same short-termist problems that afflict other firms. Relatedly, Toyota’s senior management have all spent decades if not their entire careers at Toyota and still includes members of the Toyoda family. Those guys are probably not going to play fast and loose with resiliency just to make quarterly numbers look good. They are going to look at the quantified and understood cost of their resiliency buffers and say, “removing this buffer might save lots of money next quarter but in the long run that represents a risk to a company I intend to pass down to my grandchildren so I won’t do it”. Whereas a different manager at a different company might say, “this will definitely make the next quarter’s numbers look amazing and if there are consequences in the long run, either I’ll have switched companies or I can just say it’s not my fault”.

Is it really 100% bad? Do people really think that the goal of humanity is to work in the most efficient way to extract the most economic value from everything possible? Can't we just be content being 50% efficient and use the other 50% of that effort to chill with family and friends and talk about films or something?

> ...Just because you’re a top performer...

Do you just trust performance reviews for finding them? My experience in BigTech that those can't be always trusted. It seems getting good reviews is a skill and some people are better at it while some others might not even care about ratings at all.

I was reacting to the idea that the "top execs" are generally not the people you'd want. There was an undertone in pg's description that seemed to me like, "SJ hated those stupid and ineffective managers so he bypassed them to invite the people doing the real work."

I've worked in places with some ineffective managers, and at bigger companies I've witnessed a few ladder-climbing sociopathic liars, so I get the sentiment.

I just think it's more useful to figure out how to remove those ineffective people, or better yet build a cultural immune system that rejects them, rather than bypass them.

The lesser title attracted candidates who were happy to take direction from founders, and the founder still stays in the “head of sales” seat.

Once the sales manager is ramped up, grow as much as possible then bring a VP to oversee it all, but with a larger team already in place it will be harder for them to mess up what’s working.

... but I explicitly stated what they did and it was not nothing

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.

In Jobs’ case, his personality was probably strong enough that didn’t matter but broadly it can be helpful to officially say, “this person is important even though they don’t manage anyone”. It helps with fairness so that people don’t have to seek out the “secret” ways of being important, and it can accelerate decision making in the absence of someone like Steve Jobs

I think it's important to have the distinction between delivering video content and the in-app experience. I do think streaming VOD is way easier than live content.

Nearly none of these comments are grounded in his actual text.

(edit) see the urban dictionary definition in the sibling comment.

If you get the wrong people in the beginning, it can throw you into a wrong trajectory that's almost impossible to correct later.

What you describe sounds like a "founders just came together" trying to impersonate the IBM org chart without having figured out product-market fit yet, or even earlier than that.

Was it a new space startup in the Bay area?

"I'm so much smarter than them."

"Well they have a yacht and 3 homes."

Who used their smartness better?