Comment by jppope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jppope | Hacker News Reader

Though I think this article could be better, Kent is off in the right direction. Paul is unusually ambiguous about "founder mode" in his essay. Implicitly, he was saying that founders have a super power by not just letting good people do good work, that they (the founders) should involve themselves in decisions/discussions/work that professional managers should/could not.

Many of us understand what he's going after, but he really didn't articulate it well. Kent basically makes that point in this essay by attempting to break it down and provide a more concrete foundation for the concept.

My issue with both articles is that they are ignoring the curse of knowledge that these outlier founders have, and from that they are ruining their own paradigm... If you ask a top performing athlete how to be a top performing athlete its likely not going to be very useful advice if its directed at a novice. However in a conversation between those top performers there will be the nuance and the context to what they are trying to express that can make it true.

I'm happy that Kent wrote this article, but I really think PG would benefit from revisiting his article to provide what he actually means to the rest of us.

> I really think PG would benefit from revisiting his article to provide what he actually means to the rest of us.

I read PG's article as explicitly saying, "I'm not going to talk about what Founder Mode is yet because nobody has any idea what it is. A whole bunch have us have only just realized that it's a thing, and it isn't X. Now that we know it exists, let's try to figure out what it is, rather than what it isn't."

Most of the reactions I've seen so far seem to be implicitly assuming that if Founder Mode isn't X, it must be -X; that is, if it's not "Hire good people and let them do their jobs", then by logical necessity it must be "Hire mediocre people and run around micromanaging, countermanding orders, and generally undermining them." (Or maybe -0.5X, which is like X but more moderate: "Hire decent people and supervise them closely, occasionally countermanding orders.")

I doubt very much that's at all what Paul, or any of the other people at the talk he mentioned, had in mind. It's a false dichotomy. The first step in breaking out of a false dichotomy is realizing that what you're facing isn't a dichotomy; the second step is figuring out what the other options are. Loads of people responding seem not to have made the first step yet.

EDIT: The real goal of Founder Mode is probably to optimize for something completely different, which in some cases means deviating from the "Hire good people and let them do their jobs" guidance. But the point isn't to aim at deviation, the point is to aim at this other thing which might cause deviation. Micromanaging for no other reason than that you see other successful founders sometimes micromanage is just cargo culting.

> Hire mediocre people and run around micromanaging, countermanding orders, and generally undermining them

This is how most corporations operate. Tight budgets for headcount, cunning micromanagers, and emotional manipulation to try and get people to have less opinions and deliver more for a stale salary.

Now these corporations are never going go get any sort of competitive advantage through innovation, but they get a huge amount of corporate and governmental contracts.

This is an extremely negative view on what it takes to run a large scale organization.

No, he's right on because of power laws. Sure, some corps will be run really well, but most corps will be mediocre.

Power laws? Could you please elaborate? I’m curious.

Managers only hire and reward based on loyalty and threats in these highly political environments. It is very common to see a decent director with very weak managers under him, to ensure that nobody is a threat to his position.

Mediocre corporations work in a very different way from results oriented high performance companies. In mediocre places, games of power rule the place, even if it doesn't make sense economically.

Different definition of power law, but still very applicable to this case.

On any given dimension, everyone/everything cannot possibly be above average. If you take competence, most companies will be mediocre. At best you have a bell curve, at worst it's an exponential curve with only a very small amount of high competence.

Hacker News folks tend to see the best side of corporations, working for well managed, innovation driven, purpose oriented places.

It's a privilege. Most corporations are not Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc - which a lot of us either work for, or work for companies that were heavily inspired by these top companies.

Yes, past a certain point you are operating to reduce variance.

There's only so many top 1% players, and if you aren't able to pay as well as the GOOG/MSFT/AMZN/AAPLs of the world, then your not going to be able to hire 1000s and 1000s of them.

So most employers are not able to be as selective, especially at scale. Which means they are hiring for B+ players and putting in a lot of "administrivia" to prevent screwups. It's more about hiring for average outcomes and avoiding the downside.

Scrappy startups pre-scale can be an exception in that they have equity and independence to offer to hires in lieu of top tier compensation. Both of those of course are drastically reduced when you have 10s, 100s, 1000s and then 10,000s of employees.

It's not a diss on anyone, so much as the natural order of things.

Even those corporations aren't homogenous in how well they are managed and have a lot of "second class citizen" to whom the privilege doesn't have to apply (managed services, external dev partners, armies of contractors...)

But it's reality

Sounds realistic in my experience... Maybe not everywhere but definitely a thing.

I would argue they can get competitive advantage despite this, or thanks to this by squeezing more juice out of employees while externalizing some of the cost on employee health.

Founder Mode literally is X.

You are exactly wrong. X is what Paul calls "Manager Mode":

> The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb's free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.

> ...In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

Musk even gave his editorial blessing as per PG's acknowledgements at the very bottom.

Ah. Another reason Twitter's new name is kind of dumb.

I’m not sure that the goal of founder mode is to tank revenue and reputation.

It's all about the vision; remaining in control and staying highly influential. And yes, at the same time the pendulum swings in both ways as we can see with Musk, DHH etc. Pick your "Hero Story" :P

Beck focuses too much on survival, as FWIW Chesky / PG talked about larger companies. Most of them are and will be doing fine either way. Unless this is all about further increasing shareholder value again, which it might. Not a "survival" topic then, or is it?

He meant that micromanaging and getting into details is good (not disparaging him here, fwiw I agree with him), but he didn't want to come right out and say it. Also, I think he's not yet sure what else it involves -- like the 100 ppl party thing. He just knows it's not delegation.

> He meant that micromanaging and getting into details is good

This isn't what I took away, but it may be that we're saying the same thing differently.

My takeaway was that founders should 'trust, but verify'. And where they disagree/don't understand, they should question and pursue the truth of the matter rather than defer to experience.

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