something jeff bezos always warned against was the "narrative fallacy" - for one to believe so strongly in a compelling story that they dont stop for data.
here's the stock charts of the founder of founder mode vs a professional manager mode guy :)
https://x.com/ericnewcomer/status/1830998969490526423
just a fun reminder not to take everything as gospel.
to engage more substantively with TFA:
> I think the general pattern that Brian was identifying was the following. A young, inexperienced founder with limited management experience is running a rapidly scaling company. Famous VCs invest a lot of money and join the board. Headcount passes 100 and quickly grows beyond 1000. The VCs (who often have never run anything themselves) encourage the founder to hire “executives” with “scaling experience”. > > The founder is told to “empower” these executives, who typically then implement techniques that worked for them at previous companies. But, too often, these techniques fail in the new company.
yes, i have worked at a company where this happened — sans the "quickly grows beyond 1000" - we never got there before our hired gun execs made enough political moves to effectively kill the company momentum. i dont know if our founder couldve righted the ship by himself since he had his own issues to overcome, but i'm 100% sure he would have been better off just having the hired guns be advisors rather than management layers.
This seemed like an obvious blindspot in the pg essay - if you take the 0.1% most successful founders and put them in a room together (which is the context of his essay) then of course you're going to come away looking for that special ingredient which makes these people so special.
It could just be luck. But you're not likely to learn much without also talking to all the people who were just as talented and still failed.
> here's the stock charts of the founder of founder mode vs a professional manager mode guy :)
I've always told myself if I start a company that ever reaches, say, 250+ employees, I'd step down. First, playing a management game doesn't interest me (it's sort of like Risk vs Monopoly; the former is fun, the latter I find boring). And second, I just like building things. I wish the meme/essay would be about "builder mode" because I do think that's more of a thing than "founder mode."
I also think, uncontroversially I'd wager, that the skillset is just different. Building an MVP, finding product market fit, pivoting, trying new things, failing, and doing it all over (and over, and over) again is just absolutely fundamentally different than running a large corporation, trying to maneuver around market sentiment, dealing with politics, and so on.
Wow this really hits home for me. I can do long stints at a job but when I do I inevitably start building all kinds of things on the side because that’s what I love doing.
I understand the sentiment but you may be overlooking how you and your interests can change as the company scales. The version of you running the 200 person company probably looks different from the seed stage version and won't want to quit at 250. That said, if you don't want to have a bunch of people working for you, it seems kind of unlikely that you'll find yourself in that position.
Bezos also said, "When the anecdotes disagree with the data, it's usually the anecdotes that are right"
The end of that quote is "there is something wrong with the way that you are measuring your data". Which changes the meaning of the quote (without it, it's "value anecdotes over data", with it, it's "use inconsistencies with anecdotes to identify problems with data".
Here, I'll formalize it with statistical language: "the likelihood of the events we sample are inconsistent with the model we've used to explain our data."
The two charts are basically identical except for Uber's last 6 months...
Putting aside the inherent irrationality of stock charts for measuring anything other than the markets' (wildly inaccurate) interpretations of a topic, I agree with you. Rhetoric is a rich-mans' stand-in for actual argumentation with evidence and response to criticism.
Replacing founders with professional managers was the norm in SV until the mid 2000s and the Zuck era began. See for example Google with Schmidt.
The problem is about delegating effectively, especially in the case of delegating to executives. The issue is treating parts of the org as "black boxes" and optimising for the wrong thing as a founder. Some founders/CEOs delegate the things they don't want to do or aren't good at. Others want to reinvent the wheel in terms of what "managing" and "direct reports" means. Still others just want to set the vision and hire some "strategists" etc. (who's doing the work?)
Founder mode is basically optimising for the quality of the product down to the gritty details and keeping wannabe professional fakers that manage up on a short leash.
I'm kind of surprised it is not still the norm. Apple, Google, MSFT have all done quite well with their non-founder leadership.
So, war time CEO vs peace time CEO?
Peace time CEOs might be a dying breed :)
It's less about that distinction and more about not turning execs into mini 'CEO/founders' - their incentives are completely different. When the full extent of the damage they've caused reveals itself, most execs will be long gone.
An interesting read. I've been a Monzo customer ever since the sign-up process was "come to the office and we'll give you your card and help you get the Beta version of the app installed" and it's been interesting, exciting (and sad, in some ways) to see it grow and morph into what it is today.
Back then, you were more likely than not to get an engineer dealing with your customer support queries. There was a Slack community, a forum community and it felt very much like a scrappy little start-up that was truly making a difference in what - in the UK - had been an industry dominated by companies that didn't really care about user experience or modern technology (I'd had the misfortune of doing work for some of those banks). They even had an API which customers could use to get their own data!
The pace of progress was rapid, too. I remember asking Tom if he'd ever consider offering business current accounts, since the competition was pretty dire at the time - the answer back then was a "no, we're focussing on retail" - but I'm happy to use my Monzo business account daily now!
I had the opportunity to work on a proposal and sit down with some folks from one of Monzo's partnerships team a few weeks back for a potential collaboration which ultimately didn't end up going forwards. The staff were lovely, but it didn't feel like quite the same company I'd visited in-person years ago to collect my pre-paid card from. I guess that's something that inevitably happens as companies scale up.
> Instead, I believe that great leaders have to be able to dig into the details, have an incredibly high bar for quality, and ultimately do great IC work themselves. Great managers have to manage the work - they should primarily be responsible for quality and speed of output. Managing people must be secondary to managing the product.
If you are ever confused about founder-mode vs manager-mode, this is the one single insight that you need to internalize.
Put in other words, the org needs leaders who drive from the front. Not managers who build empires and run performance reviews from the back.
Driving from the front involves looking at external-facing data - customer happiness, features that land better, maintenance of services - things that make the customers life better - whether internal customer of external customer. They need to spend a lot of time collaborating with peer leaders, distant leaders, diagonal leaders, different departments regardless of anyone's position in the org chart.
However, most large tech companies are filled with dogshit management that tries to micromanage number of commits, meetings, standups, Jira points, velocity, performance calibrations, stack ranking, PIPs - aka inward looking things that are mostly set up to catch their own people doing something. Also called politics - personal gain triumphs all.
Even a 5th grader can tell you - practice makes perfect. And if your leaders are practicing inward politics as opposed to outward exploration and collaboration, you are getting exactly what they are practicing - inward politics.
Most of us are confused by founder mode because Paul Graham invented the term like a month ago.
> At Monzo, we experimented with some pretty wacky management structures at times. There was a period when our middle managers were basically just responsible for “pastoral care” of each employee. They were not connected at all with the output that the ICs were producing. It was totally insane and overlapped with our period of lowest productivity by far.
Funny - I took a manager role where the company was trying this approach. I was the manager, but I wasn’t empowered to manage the team or their work. They had a lot of feel-good ideas about empowering employees and reducing the role of managers.
It had the same result. Lowest productivity period of my career, for the entire company. It turns out there is some value to traditional management structures when implemented properly. Nearly all of the companies that experiment with weird management structure ideas seem to discover this eventually, and either revert to traditional management structures or they get built up in the shadows via social standing within the company.
> Lowest productivity period of my career, for the entire company
"Productivity" is a nebulous concept in knowledge work. So unless you're referring to a factory with a very concrete, measurable output, this isn't particularly meaningful term.
How was the quality and employee satisfaction (as shown by solicited feedback or subjective anecdotes, plus attrition/turnover, etc.)?
It was low productivity as in we didn’t really accomplish anything. Teams couldn’t figure out what to build because it was forbidden for managers to direct them.
Happiness was down too because everyone just wanted to work, but we had these obscure rules about who could decide what was worked on (not managers) that turned into roadblocks to getting anything done across teams.
This wasn’t a case where “productivity” was an abstract metric that wasn’t measuring the right thing. It was just gridlock where nothing was getting done because nobody was allowed to be empowered to direct things.
Oof, certainly sounds like a miserable train wreck.
These are the sort of ideas that, at best, seem like they should be explored with an isolated R&D approach, or simply left to academics.
And, if they are executed realtime with a companies mainline workforce and somehow succeed, it should be clearly stated and understood that it was—like much "success"—by no small amount of sheer luck (or happenstance via uncontrolled factors, if you prefer), force of will, and patience by the team as a whole, rather than the usual narrative which is the inspired actions of single prescient individual (who will then go on to write a book and give TED Talks about an approach that absolutely cannot be applied anywhere else and does not scale.)
It can be hard or impossible to measure certain things, and just as hard to pick the right measures. But, there are also cases where you can say all reasonable measures are worse in one instance than another. Less new ideas, less happiness, less stuff going out the door, less bug fixes. Especially possible when it’s a time window comparison. This sounds like one of those cases.
I got, what feels like, the most productive month of the year behind me, because I thought that the data nerd top executives flagged me because my GitHub stats were down and they keep an eye on me. It turns out I took something as a hint from my engineering manager that wasn’t directed towards me, and my stats were fine.
In the end they got increased productivity out of me because I thought I was flagged in some faceless soulless nonsensical “insights” dashboard.
And by productive I mean that I feel like I made more impactful changes than usually, so I’m not referring to GitHub stats with fake cheat PRs and changes.
Thanks for sharing! Good take.
There is also this checklist I used to use for more "practical references" https://www.craftengineer.com/the-founder-mode-used-by-brian...
like everything else coming from startup people, none of this means anything.
none of the items listed there preclude a CEO from only talking to direct reports and viewing the org chart as a set of black boxes that their reports are responsible. having "engineering and design report to the founder" doesn't mean anything. is that saying everyone who does engineering and design has an executive as their manager?
nothing in that list talks about hiring or firing practices.
whomever wrote this post would have great success as an object-oriented clean code thought leader, where their skills at saying nothing would earn them slots at conferences and social media followers.
>I believe that great leaders have to be able to dig into the details, have an incredibly high bar for quality, and ultimately do great IC work themselves. Great managers have to manage the work - they should primarily be responsible for quality and speed of output. Managing people must be secondary to managing the product.
Some nice take always:
-Never make someone a manager if they are not capable of being an being an reasonably competent _technical_ IC.
-If there is a situation where a manager who is not a capable ( for what ever reason) IC manages a team, then a capable IC member must be given authority to overrule any decisions that the manager may make. In this case the manger is just a co-ordinater/secretary.
- When a potential manager joins a company, make them do IC works. (already covered in the essay : ' customer service for one day a month..' )
Somehow I feel that Paul Graham has contaminated the startup discourse with his "Founder Mode" essay.
Not to mention, PG is taking the dangerous route and only looking at a few data points (let's be honest, just one - Brian Chesky, not even Joe or Nate) and trying to extrapolate that over the rest of the domain.
According to PG, Sam was one of his favorite founder types a decade earlier. How did that founder mode work out, except for a failed startup, then having to kick him out of YC, and now heading a startup where all the core team members left for greener pastures? If Loopt did pan out, I'm sure PG would be raving over Sam instead.
At this point, it's about time PG steps out of his inner circle shell and actually meet some successful founders in the YC community on the regular.
Its forcing employees to create value, when they really just want to collect compensation
Programmers love to name things, and then argue about the name.
For me, "founder mode" just means being extremely motivated to go "harder, better, faster, stronger" (ala Daft Punk and Kanye).
You don't need to be a founder to be motivated and just because you're a founder doesn't mean you're motivated. But the two nicely line up.
Calling it founder mode has obviously been a great way to get nerds to argue about it, so good on pg.
Yep, the nerd sniping worked, and besides there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Unlike PG's half-baked founder mode essay, this article is more complete in describing what behaviors are successful during scaling. It also matches my experience when Netflix was scaling up the streaming business in the 2010-2016 era.
> how do good leaders stay in the detail and run great companies at scale?
It's a relevant question not just for founders but for leaders at every level.
IMO, one test for a "good leader" is whether they are capable of doing the work 1 to 2 levels down into their teams. The more familiarity they have, the more they are able to hire, fire, and evaluate those people. After all, it's pretty hard to evaluate work in an unfamiliar domain. Paradoxically, though, good leaders do not contribute to that work directly. So how do they maintain their skills if they don't do the work?
Consider the case of a front-line engineering manager with IC engineer reports. A good one will know their team's codebase, know where it could be easily extended and have good intuition for the time required for any given feature idea. They know the difference between good and bad code. But they NEVER submit PRs, mostly because the maker schedule/manager schedule problem [1] forces a choice of doing only one type of work well. (Every new manager I've seen who wants to "spend 10-30% of their time writing code" will either fail to support that code or fail to support their team as a manager, when in a fast growing team or company.)
The solution for eng. managers is to have the codebase on their machine, be able to build and run it, and occasionally implement their own experiments or POCs. These things NEVER go to production. It's meant purely to maintain the manager's familiarity with the codebase and staying current with their team's output. (Hat tip to CW).
Note that we still don't have good labels for these behaviors. "Hands on" and "hands off" confuses the issue-- is the example above "hands on" or "hands off?" It's both and neither, because those aren't useful labels.
There are other solutions for leaders higher up the org chart. The article mentions skip level 1:1s and niche area deep dives both with the purpose of evaluating leadership effectiveness. When I did these, I'd always start with setting the same context: I have two goals for this meeting and one non-goal. I want to hear about what you're working on, what's going well and where the challenges are. I also want to answer any questions you have about what's going on elsewhere in the company. My non-goal is giving you specific direction, since that's always between you and your manager. I'm just here to gather and share information.
The role of a leader is to set goals, share context and ensure the right team is in place, hiring and firing as needed. They need to know what's going on from top to bottom in the teams they lead, and in order to hire effectively, they need to be capable of doing the work 1-2 levels below them. But they never actually contribute 1-2 levels down, because that would severely undermine the people they've delegated to.
I think this is why so many had a knee-jerk reaction to in PG's founder mode essay, where he implied that founders have a special ability to bypass management layers and contribute directly (in the Steve Jobs example). I've seen it happen, and it failed 100% of the time. 100%. After establishing some amount of managerial structure -- wild guess would be after 50+ total employees -- contributing directly several layers down into your team is a recipe for disaster. The puzzle is how to lead effectively without making that mistake.
[1] maker schedule/manager schedule https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html * Bonus behavior: good managers are sensitive to booking meetings with any of their team members who are on the maker schedule.
Replace managers with AI
I have some sense that it would work better than most CEOs. It would require someone reasonably smart to build the system and keep it fed with the right data etc, but the amount of decision making and additional context as to why decisions are made etc would be valuable, especially where CEOs are a bottle neck (which is... a lot of places)
If you have a strategy and need plans, maybe you could use an AI (probably not LLMs). If you need a strategy, maybe you can feed high-level goals into an AI and it could come up with one (though it will have difficulty thinking outside its box). But the primary value of a CEO is being the definitive source of high-level goals and systemic values. An AI is not going to come up with those, except by mimicking the stated goals and values of other CEOs.
It's easy to say "the high-level goal is maximizing profit" but as we all lament daily, having that as a goal is both vapid and only functional in the short-term.
Why can't it come up with those?
I mean sure, it can make things up just like any fake CEO can. I can ask ChatGPT for a list of goals and values right now and they might even sound reasonable.
But there's no discernment, no conviction. No actual 'seeing', just words and concepts thrown together in an attempt to pass muster. You can argue that's all that humans are doing, and to be sure, there are many people who are faking it like this all the time, sometimes through their entire life, and even in high-level positions. One of them is even running for president right now. But when you compare one of these fakers with someone who has actual principles and values and meaningful goals, there's clearly a bright line difference. And there's no way the current round of AI/LLMs could have that, no matter how much they sell it or say that's around the corner.
Someone should at least do the experiment and see what happens. I can see it now: ChatCEO.
To equity-holders, it's code for the obsession that makes founders work extra-hard to please the financiers. To employees, it's code for being an abusive asshole.
FWIW, I would never describe any of the (successful, with exits and now-successful brands) founders I worked for this way. It's disgusting.
It's been a long, long time since pg had to answer to employees. He clearly no longer understands the current labor market, nor what it implies about actual workplace conditions.
EDIT: To be clear, "obsessive" attention to detail is still what makes products work coherently. It's the rhetoric that an individual, even a "founder" taking on mountains of potential value, should (or even can) shoulder and internalize this, without breaking, that is inherently wrong.
I think the most damning comment of all on "founder mode" came not from the critics but from a LinkedIn post giving Brian Chesky apparently sincere praise for purportedly examplifying it. Apparently AirBNB had completely screwed up customer support responses to a fellow founder to the extent they'd blocked her, but as she was a member of the YC alumni network, a quick message and Brian resolved her in a few minutes, at the weekend. Who needs process or executive decision making at lower levels when you have "founder mode"?!
Customer support mistakes are unavoidable in large companies and AirBNB definitely isn't the worst offender in that regard, but I can't really imagine a bigger example of dysfunction in a B2C business than customer support resolution being the CEO needing to respond to personal messages of customers well connected enough to reach him via private channels. But now customer support failure is actually something to aspire to, provided it involves the important virtue of CEOs being busy at weekends.
The behavior you've described seems deeply dysfunctional but for reasons that are entirely separate from how the term "founder mode" has gained a life of its own. "Founder mode" is being weaponized to critique people for entering a market much more competitive and dry of opportunity than it was thirty years ago Without acknowledging any change in the market the article at hand seems to be just a person belching complaints without anything to say.
Comparisons with the big internet successes of 25-30 years ago are pretty wild anyway, on the basis that Google is pretty much the poster child for tech founders letting a professional manager install a hierarchy to do the running-big-company stuff, and Pierre Omidyar not only left day to day management as soon as eBay floated but also made a point of moving out the Valley and portraying himself as a philanthropist rather than a business leader.
The original essay felt more like scrabbling around for a reason why founders felt their companies were less effective with more levels of hierarchy whilst somehow missing the essential truth that managing a team of 1000 is harder than managing a team of 15 no matter how you do it. I'm just here for all the wild takes on founder greatness and founder obligation that came with it!
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".
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I am glad he is calling out the C-levels for their propensity to lie and 'manage up'. This is a character trait that needs to be annihilated. We should not be filtering for what is effectively psychopathy.
I have watched so many amazing and sustainable products die because someone let the MBAs in. After sitting through so much of this crap dogma in my own business school classes, I would say the vast majority of what they/we are taught is actively harmful to most businesses.
I don't like it more than you do, but it exists because it works in practical reality.
To replace it you must come up with something that works even better.
I disagree with this blocking tactic of "if you want to complain about it you must come up with something better"
Like, yes, let me completely redo my entire life path so I can redo one stupid argument.... I would love to, but I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth that gives me the sapce to explore these things, and I have more practical matters to attend to. Until then, we're going to be complaining to anyone that would listen.
This is why we elect representatives to handle our complaints. Except in the business world there are no representatives and the regulatory bodies are actively made toothless (by business interests), so the only prevailing doctrine is the one that allows the people at the top to steal ("capture") the most value from the process. Everyone else can just go fuck themselves, amiright? This is a system that needs to be destroyed.
I don't mind you complaining at all!
I said that to replace it you must come up with something better.
I don't believe at all in the theory that if we only destroy the old system completely, a new just and effective system will arise from the ashes.
It isn't just about replacing the system, because as you say it works for the people that stand to benefit the most from it. A better replacement can never emerge until we have reprogrammed the culture of maximization and "efficiency" that has been allowed to fester.
I don't claim to know what a replacement would look like, but I personally think it would hold 'servant leadership' as a primary tenet, and destroy the notion of shareholder primacy, and have some sort of increasing level of entropy that scales as the business does, to the point where large companies are simply unsustainable for all but the most important of endeavors.
>To replace it you must come up with something that works even better.
Huh? I thought it was obvious: don't hire the MBA types as managers.
Fuck "founder mode". Work in "fuck off" mode.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41545495
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1fgv248/fuck_founder_...
Its a grindset.
Founder mode is funny. There's definitely some companies that benefit and there's others that don't, and it's not clear which is which. But the term "founder mode" is so funny that we now use it in my group of friends (of which the majority have started software companies worth $xxx million) as an analogue for "going ham".
On the basketball court, when someone's got a hot hand: Damn, he's going founder mode.
At dinner, when someone devours a meal: I went founder mode on that shit dude.
Founder mode = drop out of Berkeley and copy paste open source code?
I wonder if 'founder mode' is the antithesis to Agile as getting shit done is against the manifesto (in practice).