Comment by RichardKain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RichardKain | Hacker News Reader

I think the vast majority of businesses are run in "Founder Mode," and maybe the majority of start ups. That's why they don't make it. The books about delegation from the HBS crowd are in some respects a reaction to that default mode.

Chesky and Jobs are obviously managerial outliers for their extreme accomplishment. Anytime one cites Jobs as a guru I'm reminded of an evaluation Bill Gates made about Jobs, to the effect of: entrepreneurs think Steve Jobs was an asshole, so they can be one too. But they're not Steve Jobs.

Even then: Airbnb in Founder or Manager Mode efficacy is very hard to disentangle from Airbnb and Covid. With no Covid, manager mode continues - would it be worse off? Hard to say. Apple has done exceptionally well (at least financially) under Jobs' successor Cook, surely in manager mode.

As other commenters note there are ample examples such as Nvidia (or Valve, Bloomberg, many others) which run as surprisingly flat but scaled organizations.

Fear of the ossifying effects of bureaucracy is a consistent theme in PG's essays for good reason. Finding ways to incentivize/align middle managers with the same urgency a founder has is another. "Founder mode" in the wrong hands drives away other good managers and is perhaps best used in the Ben Horowitz framework of Wartime instead of Peacetime for companies.

But boy I really do wish to have seen the original speech, surely more replete with details that answer my objections. I love the professional liars observation, they are the antagonists to both good founders and good managers.

Even though I run a company which has only 4 million profit per year, I have seen something similar that once a company starts being successful, you attract these people who's only job is to move from successful company to successful company in a sort of a circuit. They don't add much value but they know how to stay out of trouble.

So what happens I think is that most business value is brought about by a very small percentage of a company's actual day-to-day productive output. However, as a company grows, you do need this additional people because without them the company will start losing value. But a very few people and very few work in the company actually adds value and gets the company to the next step. So imagine something like apple the iMac when they launched it and then the iPhone and then the iPod drove the company into what we know it to be today. But if they didn't have all of the other managers and stuff who were pushing papers and getting things going, the company wouldn't even exist. The founder really needs to know what matters in the company no matter how large it gets and how to go to the next step in the company and that will take very very little of the company's actual outputs. Figure out who are directly responsible for creating those outputs and create a direct relationship with them. Going through the mbas and the paper pushers is secondhand information and usually they are tampered with.

You don’t think the HBS crowd has kind of a vested interest here? They are on the top of the professional faker totem pole for god’s sake. :)

I'm not sure which is worse, the MBAs with their proclamations coming from a place with a complete lack of experience or the founders who think they're a genius for riding an economic trend in one of the most forgiving markets in recent history.

Some of his recent talks cover it: https://youtu.be/aZ-BjJZxNoA?si=yPYH71a76Mr1RWLr

https://youtu.be/4ef0juAMqoE?si=fya1OCfUUR4n_gd1

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