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Comment by tbe-stream | Hacker News Reader

The founder mode binary is way too simplistic.

There are examples of successful companies all over the founder mode spectrum.

What level of "founder mode" is optimal depends on a lot of factors. For example:

- size of the company - available people (at every level of the company) - type and number of products (is it possible to scale the work over different departments?) - qualities/personalities of the founders (trust me when I tell you, being micromanaged by a non-technical founder on a technical product is not effective) - type of business (for example; in aviation, you're going to need a lot of certification management)

And you can execute poorly all over the spectrum, even when making the right choice on the level of "founder mode".

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Agreed; I dont remember the source but I much prefer the Marines → Navy → Police continuum. Some circumstances require a highly capable team with high communication, aligned goals and motives, who can take decisions individually or at a low enough level. Some circumstances require bureaucracy, process, external and internal controls.

The dumb "Founder mode" discourse hides away two things: a) scale forces you to climb that ladder towards bureaucracy and controls anyway, b) it's scope-specific. You don't want to go "Founder mode" on phone support. Or accounts payable, or probably HR. There are specific objectives, projects and also circumstances that need a more hands-on approach. And honestly a "Marines" analogy where the team is tight and authorized to make decisions, is better than some micro-managing, coke-fueled "Founder mode".

Indeed, often a mix of both types of processes is needed within a company.

For those who are not familiar with it, check out Jeff Bezos’ 1997 Letter to Shareholders on irreversible (Type 1) vs. reversible (Type 2) decision making.

Can you link to the letter you are referring to? The top few results of my search had no mention of reversible decision making.

Try searching for 1-way vs 2-way decisions

Here is the 1997 letter to shareholders that I found: https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/amzn_shar...

edit: I think I found it: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516...

Most at-scale firms struggle to create the authority internally for specific teams to act, as you call, "Marines" within the bounds of their responsibility.

Something I'd term as an "authority budget", that is, not an approved annual dollars budget of what they can spend, but a defined amount/area of authority that they can flex without needing to escalate.

The most stifling thing to any high performance employee is to have no sense of control, to have the ground constantly shifting under them OR feeling like their company is actively trying to protect themselves from you & making your job harder.

Yet this is the average case for many larger orgs.

There are good reasons for this from an organizational perspective as it reduces risk from a “lone wolf” making a catastrophic decision. It’s a good idea to have checks and balances when billions of dollars of people’s investments are at risk. Yes, the company may miss out on a few big victories from star performers, but it avoids catastrophic risks from overly allocated authority to a single individual.

People like Paul seem to have just so much to say about startups for such a long time that at some point it starts to feel like they’re coming up with stuff to have things to keep saying.

The binary state is too simplistic. But it is largely the hook to make the post attractive and successful.

It matches the popular sentiment among some engineers that professional management is useless or even harmful.

I feel this but how many long term successful companies exist with no professional management folks? Beyond Valve, are there more than a few existence proofs?

My impression: there are very few and for good reasons.

I'd say Valve isn't even that successful at managing. IMO they lucked into a huge market demand and did a competent job. Yet haven't managed to produce HL3 after several attempts. There are also some horror stories from former employees of a shadow hierarchy and popularity contests.

Not exactly.

Let's say I'm a founder. I am one with the vision of what we're trying to build. Can a professional manager do that better than I can? Can he/she make the calls about what's in or out of scope, or what the architecture needs to be, better than I can? No and no.

So it's not that professional management is harmful, just that it's worse than the founder can do.

And in a startup, that's likely true. But founders don't scale, and there comes a point in the growth of a company where it quits being true.

You may be right about the answer for any individual decision, but for the universe of all decisions, the answers are yes and yes, because any decision is better than no decision, and a culture where only the founder's decisions are good enough is a culture that has a massive bottleneck in its ability to make decisions.

It depends on three things: how fast the founder can make decisions, how fast the managers can make decisions, and how many total decisions there are to make.

Founders often can make decisions more quickly than managers. They can also revisit decisions more quickly than managers. If the company is small, the founders can be a win - especially with higher-quality decisions.

> how fast the founder can make decisions

This is just another way of saying that the decisions of founders are not strictly better. Even if it's stipulated that founders always make better decisions given the same time constraints, their advantage will dwindle quickly as they become more time constrained.

> They can also revisit decisions more quickly than managers.

Why? This seems very unclear to me... I would intuitively say the exact opposite. Founders seem far more likely to make a decision, move on, and never think about that particular thing again.

To use a concrete example. Say a founder makes a key hire, essentially unilaterally, but to a position that does not report directly in to them. Who is more likely to notice and revisit that decision if the person isn't working out, the founder who hired them or the manager (and team) who is working with them day to day? It's the manager, clearly. The founder has done their part, they've brought in a key person, they're off focused on something totally different, as they should be, they have no idea how this person is working out.

I may be wrong - I haven't done a survey or anything - but my sense is that age (or experience) divide on this, the more I appreciate management.

Even mediocre management is pretty good, but good management is great.

It amazes me how much people seems to want someone like PG to just give them a single one size fits all solution to all their founder problems. It just will never exist for any particular person/company/situation. The trick is to be aware of the differing modes and when to apply them. And also, knowing these things can be useful when receiving external advise (investors, advisors, etc) as far as evaluating whether the advise would even work for your situation.

Where founder mode can be felt is when a founder has a "Vision" for their company, perhaps one that is difficult for others to see. They lean into the functional areas of their company that make strides into executing that vision and bringing it to reality. This is where they probably should exercise Founder mode. Other functions of the company may be support areas or lower impact areas towards realizing the vision, or just benefit from a particular domain expertise, this is where Manager mode likely comes into play. Although, I don't like the framing of "hire smart people and let them do good work" because it makes it sound like there are no goals or guardrails to what they are doing. The founder still needs to set expectations and monitor, and this even changes over time as next years goals for this team/individual will be different than this years.

In any case, hiring good people is most likely still going to be important. I think in most cases even a founder with a great vision needs to be challenged by their employees (Founder asks for X, but Engineer makes a case for Y). You don't want to squash collaboration and morale. Although, if you're lucky enough to be an exceptional Founder then your employees will tolerate it, it's probably not a good strategy to bank on though.

Precisely. The causation direction is reversed.

A lot of whether "founder mode" or whatever the opposite works has more to do with the personality of the founder.

Some founders are going to fail in either mode. Successful founders have their preferred mode but aren't succeeding because of the mode. I suppose if a successful founder was in some way forced (by who?) to use the opposite of their preferred mode they'd have more difficulty, but they still are likely to succeed.

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