Paul Graham's Founder Mode Essay was more polarizing than US politics

6 points by satishmreddy 1 year ago | 1 comment

Yet, nothing about “Founder mode” was NEW. Both Founders and Non-Founders at Yahoo, Yelp & Meta used it in their organizations, when I worked there. So why was the essay so polarizing?

@paulg spoke negatively about 99% of tech employees who choose to support founders in their quest to build great companies. That is why this post was polarizing.

Here are the comments Paul Makes about employees (Non-Founders):

Hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground

Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides — …: and by the people working for them…..

C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.

Paul called employees at tech companies “Professional Fakers”, “Gas light founders”, “Skillfull liars”.

That is why the post polarized people.

There is nothing new in the founder mode essay:

Skip Level 1:1s: I have had skip level 1:1s for the 12 years I worked at Yahoo, Yelp, and Meta. I have had 1:1s with people two levels above me if I wanted to.

Execs in details: No exec I worked with every treated key product decisions as a blackbox. All execs at Meta are in the details of the top priorities of the org and Mark has very publicly said he does the same. @marissamayer when she joined Yahoo did weekly product reviews for every detail of product redesigns.

ICs presenting to CEOs and Exec: As an IC I did reviews with @jeremys (Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO), Zuck, @tomalison (Tom Alison FB App Head), @mosseri (Adam Mosseri IG App Head), @stan_chudnovsky (Messenger App Head), Will Cathcart (@wcathcart WhatsApp App Head)

Leadership Group across levels: Yelp and Meta both had leadership groups that included people at different levels across the company that didn’t report to the CEO.

These are just basic good leadership practices.

There is nothing new in founder mode essay that good leaders don’t already do, where they are a founder or NOT!

The thing that made the “founder mode” essay go viral is pitting Founders against the very employees they need to build large companies.

There is NO "Management Mode", there is just "Good Leadership" and "Bad Leadership". What Paul describes is "Bad Leadership" mode. Bad leadership when displayed by founders and non founders leads to poor outcomes.

And maybe @bchesky talk at YC was just his journey of figuring out Good Leadership at scale.

pjkundert 1 year ago |

I think maybe you took it too personally.

He said hiring professional fakers is bad. It is bad, and unfortunately a lot of founders do it?

Those founders who hire typical "C-level execs", many of whom are skilled liars and sociopaths (and strongly overlap with typical "Politicians", I suspect) perhaps deserve what they get: the self-destruction of their enterprise.