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Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

Feels like I am taking crazy pills when I read about this stuff. Like 1500 words that boil down to "make sure you're paying attention to whether or not people are doing a good job".

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It's also crazy that people are buying into the idea of 'Founder Mode' when Airbnb is one of the companies that is very much riding on the moat it created a while back while not doing anything much that can even remotely be called customer-obsessive (which is the lesson they could really learn from Steve Jobs)

Airbnb being customer obsessive would involve much higher labor expenses and liability, which would be counter to the goal of its investors (especially investors from pre-IPO days).

The goal is to make a business out of the higher margin parts that scale easily, and leave the lower margin customer-obsessive parts to others.

Anecdotally, in my friendship group, Airbnb in Europe seems to be losing ground quite rapidly, especially from a mind share perspective.

Prices are similar to hotels.com, with silly house rules, cleaning fees and hassle vs just turning up and leaving.

I've used Airbnb for years, and it was truly revolutionary back in the day.

I would argue that, when you get to the scale of an Airbnb, or Amazon, which is where I think the "customer-obsessive" terminology comes from, you need to move beyond focusing solely on your customers. Your business is having a social impact. The house next door to me right now has had contractors going in and out of it for the past three weeks to remove and replace the entire interior because of damage done by a short-term renter. Construction has absolutely boomed around me but nearly all of the new units are becoming short-term rentals. The neighborhood is either empty most of the time, or full of drunken idiots making a bunch of noise, getting the police called on them at 3 AM, and leaving the streets and sidewalks full of trash and broken bottles.

Airbnb may very well be making its customers happy, but when so many of those customers are 21 year-olds looking for party houses they can trash and fundamentally changing the character and safety of entire neighborhoods, is that really the most important thing? Even as the founder or executive or both of a business, you're still part of a human community and you have a duty to that community not to worsen the lives of countless bystanders in order to delight the few who happen to pay you. Make products that are valuable in general, to everybody, not products that are valuable only to your customers at everyone else's expense.

A lot of people, including people in attendance, do too. I think the reason is that people read Paul Graham posts about startup management as if they were written on stone tablets. Sometimes I think he intends for them to be taken that way (and in some cases, I think I get why), but this was not one of those cases, and the discourse ran away with it.

That said: there's a real phenomenon Graham and Chesky were grappling with, and if you've done startups for awhile --- startups, in particular, because they give you the vantage point of seeing a company's management processes develop from zero --- you've almost certainly seen it yourself. Not enough has been written about it! The point Graham was trying to make isn't banal (or wrong).

It's just not fully formed, and is being taken that way.

I've worked in startups a long time myself. Personally I've never seen this problem, feels like it's advice literally specifically for Chesky or maybe a founders at a couple dozen other unicorns. In my experience it's a way more common problem in the other direction. Founder can't let go of the details and is mucking about in everyone's work. Or have literally just become bored with the company and can't even be bothered to hire the professional executives that are supposedly such a problem. Perhaps a hot take, but IME most professional executives/managers/MBA types are actually pretty solid people to work with and do a good job.

Both things are true: there are founders who lose Github merge privileges and start meddling because they haven't defined a long-term job for themselves, and there are most definitely pasteurized processed business units that get hired and run the exact same performative playbook at startup after startup. It's not an either-or thing.

I'm not saying that both don't exist, I'm just saying PG's advice is so narrowly applicable as to be effectively "bad advice" for most people reading it.

As this article points out: Graham's article has probably been misconstrued, and is best read as "this is something you should consider and pay attention to", and not a directive for everyone to go "be in founder mode". But to be clear: I also don't think Graham's post is especially good, though I think the issue he's engaging with is important and widely slept on.

There is an implicit assumption that the founder will make good decisions. If someone is "mucking about" in everyone's work, presumably it's phrased that way because they are making a bunch of stupid decisions? Not much (there are counter examples) will fix a ceo making dumb decision after dumb decision.

It's actually worse than that. It's 1500 words that boil down to "the hierarchical structure that powers the most powerful companies, organizations and governments in the world and has for hundreds of years is all bullshit. Believe me I am very smart."

It's a complete clown show, but people love to believe stories about people bucking the system, so they eat it up.

well the oft reality: I Made Lots of Money Exploiting H1Bs You Can Trust Me Bro needs some artistic license before you can sell yourself as a thought leader

pg gets a pass for building outsized value (YC pre 2020), but the rest should probably not flex their luck and confuse it with success and spare us their 'wisdom'

> I Made Lots of Money Exploiting H1Bs You Can Trust Me Bro

Who dat?

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