[gregfjohnson]

I grew up seeing founder mode first-hand. My dad founded Celestron, and he operated just as Paul is describing. At my current company, I see the CEO doing the exact same thing, which gives me great hope. Huge contrast from my previous start-up, for which I have great anti-hope unfortunately. (Current company is Zap Surgical Systems, with Dr. John Adler as the founder.) I've seen John everywhere, all day every day. I've seen him literally on his hands and knees under our robotic treatment table back in the engineering lab, discussing details with a young mechanical engineer. And yeah, we are curing cancer ;-)

To re-iterate: What I believe PaulG is saying is that there is a crucially important phenomenon that we don't yet understand, and naming it will facilitate the process of bringing it into focus so that we can help more companies be successful.

His footnote has a painful resonance: "I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it."

This is exactly what has happened to the Agile methodology.

[rawgabbit]

I don’t believe it is that mysterious or revolutionary. What PG is describing is the “optimization of local maximum” problem.

Founders focus on the strategic goal. Managers focus on tactical goals. Rules and processes are put in place to efficiently achieve these tactical goals. The problem is, in certain situations, these local process are at odds with the broader goal. Only the Founder has the authority to break the bureaucratic rules.

My favorite example is from the film Zulu when the British quartermaster adamantly dispenses ammo per the rule book and a long queue of desperate soldiers form up. Nevermind the British were out numbered 10 or 20 to 1 and should be firing their rifles as quickly as possible and using up all their ammo as quickly as possible.

https://youtu.be/8xjCX_TXkyU

[baby]

Do managers focus on tactical goals? Or do the engineers do that? Managers are more like the glue of the system, they don’t really provide much value besides that.

[sramam]

In the enterprise, the cost of failure to ones career/reputation is unreasonably high. pg's reference to "most skillful liars in the world" stuck out to me.

The extreme conservatism employed by managers to prevent failure - can only be summed up as "success at any cost". The consequence is decisions that spread the pain far and wide.

Unfortunately, these managers are not accountable for these consequences.

It's no winder that solutions take longer, cost more, are sub-optimal at almost every level. Furthermore, they very painful for the poeple who have to suffer these solutions. But hey, some unrelated manager-chain can claim success.

The worst of it is, these managers rinse-and-repeat at their next gig!

[aiisjustanif]

Depends on what the responsibilities of your lowest managers are.

[ivan_burazin]

This is a great example, truly https://youtu.be/8xjCX_TXkyU

[p1necone]

I think the general issue here is that you can't observe successful businesses or individuals and copy their processes to be successful, because their processes are largely a symptom of their competency, not the cause.

[mustpax]

Really well put. “Processes is a symptom of competence, not the cause” is a good motto.

[kamaal]

This is just a different way of saying your managers need to be more engaged with the work they are doing and not just worry about abstract metrics like measuring progress by number of tickets they close or something as such.

The thing is this is hard to pull off even for the actual founders. For starters its just hard, and tiring(and even pointless) to keep jumping over the ever increasing bar. Even more so when you are aging, know you are going to die and you are better off enjoying some of that money you earned, in the time and health that remains. At that point, you let things go on autopilot and begin to reduce engagement with your work.

The middle managers and employees you hire don't have incentive to even care this much. They are neither paid this high to care, nor have much to lose if they don't. Younger people show some passion because they wish to learn, but once they have enough of it, they go on the same mode.

To summarise. For people who made big money making a little extra doesn't matter all that much. People who don't get paid, don't even bother to try.

[solidninja]

It comes back to the work itself being interesting and whether you actually care about the field that you are working in. I would not like to live in a world where you have to put in 80 hours a week to get a decent salary as an expert. It's true that there are a lot of people who got into the industry just because of the comp though :(

[kamaal]

>>It's true that there are a lot of people who got into the industry just because of the comp though :(

Lots of people are just tuned out. And just don't care. With or without the comp.

>>It comes back to the work itself being interesting and whether you actually care about the field that you are working in.

There was this HR in a company here in India. She spoke at length about what attracted people to IT. Basically the employees wanted the realisation that they were creating tremendous value for the company, at the same time earning very high, and of course wanted work life balance. It was more or less impossible to achieve this. There aren't even enough projects of substance to make this happen. At least not for everyone, all the time. The net result was people tuned out, or just don't involve themselves enough at their work, or associate the outcome of their work at personal level.

Another additional factor how quickly the product/projects get shut down/eol in our industry. There are not many things that last for years that you take pride building them.

[nick3443]

Some people like contributing to successful projects though, and stay engaged even while maintaining work-life balance.

[cutemonster]

Yes definitely, I think so too.

And there's a difference between working with curing cancer or optimizing people wasting money in Candy Crush

[regularfry]

I don't see anything distinct enough to call "founder mode" here. It's just one (very important, but small) sub-facet of Ron Westrum's organisational typology. That specific behaviour, of a top-of-the-tree authority figure getting involved in the weeds, is just one behaviour he calls out as characterising generative cultures, but there are others: an eagerness to find mistakes is another important one.

This has become more popularised by DORA, but Westrum divides cultures into "Generative", "Bureaucratic", and "Pathological". Someone who finds a mistake is praised in a generative culture, ignored in a bureaucratic one, and blamed in a pathological one. The conventional "management"-type detail-hiding hierarchy would be absolutely stereotypical of bureaucratic or pathological cultures depending on the goal.

From that point of view I think this is better understood than you'd think, but possibly not well communicated.

[mempko]

What I'm disappointed by is that in the hundreds of years of capitalism, there has been little or no scientific research that looks at what structures create companies that have the desirable attributes we want. The fact that Paul Graham is now coining 'founder mode' without formulating any theory and approach to test what works (you would think VCs would be a group capable of doing this research) is disappointing.

The lack of any scientific rigor means we have founders floundering when building companies. For now we can just point to individual cases like Steve Jobs or Valve and have to guess why what they did worked. We are in the snake oil period of corporate governance.

[borroka]

"What I'm disappointed by is that in the hundreds of years of capitalism, there has been little or no scientific research that looks at what structures create companies that have the desirable attributes we want."

-- It may well be that, beyond the obvious, it depends on the broader social (how society is structured) and financial context, and the spirit of the times. The same could be said of all sorts of "how to's": how to get rich, how to be successful in life (the vagueness of which already throws a wrench into the engine of exploration), how to win at soccer/football/whatever sport or skill you are interested in.

While technology may open new horizons with capabilities that were not there before (think 4G and true mobile internet experience), one might ask why, looking back at the "primitive" ways sports were trained for and played 50 years ago, nobody had the intuition to propose ways of training and playing that are closer to what we see today. It did not require new technology, it needed a different way of thinking about the problem. But what scientific research, such as the one you propose to use to study how organizations win, would have allowed this thinking to emerge? And the same will probably be pondered 50 years from now when their ways will be compared to ours.

[whizzter]

I think it's much more simple than having a separate manager or founder mode..

Good founders will want to learn or at least understand all tasks that sets their business apart without becoming micro-managers, when their become overburdened by details in certain areas the default action should be to delegate to someone they _trust_ with doing in the area rather than just hiring someone with a CV and charisma that _implies_ that they are good at handling that area.

This probably often works well for most founders initially when they only need to delegate practical tasks that they know how to measure directly.

However once the money stakes, and most importantly number of people grow. The tasks needed to be delegated are managerial rather than practical so the founders become faced with another kind of delegation that they have less proficiency in.

This is probably where things go awry, at least some of their early promotions or delegations probably didn't thrive as managers, faced with failures they start seeking out managers from the managerial class from the outside rather than risk finding the right people with domain knowledge to promote.

[itsoktocry]

There's nothing unique about Startups in this sense.

What we are talking about is people who care about the success of the business and pleasing customers, versus people who are optimizing for "corporate success" (ladder climbing).

You can find both types of people everywhere, at all levels. So it really is about "hire the best people". You just have to have the right measure of "best".

[dheera]

The real problem with methodologies like "agile" or whatever the hell is that:

- they are not magic solutions to a fundamentally flawed business, or a business that is building the wrong thing

- they are not solutions to people issues

To a great degree if you have the right business and people treat each other like humans, you don't need a methodology, just keep doing whatever you are doing.

[malfist]

Your Dad founded Celestron? That's crazy. I use an edgehd for all my astrophotography. It's a damn fine instrument.

[mlindner]

The current Celstron is owned by a Taiwanese company and just acts as a US distributor for that company so I wouldn't say its the same company anymore.

[malfist]

For some reason I was thinking Celestron was the one of the few not owned by Synta.

[fakedang]

> His footnote has a painful resonance: "I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it."

Exactly what happened with Product Market Fit. With the current AI buzz, I see everyone and their nana preaching about how their product has PMF. If you had PMF, you'd have onboarding teams, not sales teams.

[scott_w]

> His footnote has a painful resonance: "I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it."

Oh I can totally picture this being used as an excuse for bad micromanagement! Unfortunately a lot of people are more interested in "doing the label" than developing a deep understanding of why they'd do something and how to apply it correctly.

And yes, I know I just described cargo-culting ;-)

[borroka]

Doesn't it sound like the most self-absorbed footnote in the history of footnotes? "Attention, sailors. I just defined a new concept (--which is as new as the wheel, by the way--), which fundamentally changes how we see organizations, but it will be misused".

How people can take someone so self-indulgent and -absorbed seriously is beyond me. I am sure he is great at his job of nurturing start-ups, but what he had to say, he already said a long time ago.

[cwillu]

"The tao that can be named is not the eternal tao"

[borroka]

It is funny that we take such nonsense seriously when the inventor of radio and the brilliant people who built the telecommunications system on top of it said: "try this thing, you can call your mother who lives in Australia from the United States".

No, "the waves that can be used are not the eternal waves," they built a miracle and made people use it.

[itishappy]

Naming is the origin of all particular things, but the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.

The photon came after, for instance.

[borroka]

"Naming is the origin of all particular things, but the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao"--

It is mostly nonsense built on top of nonsense, I believe. To be honest, the miracles of Jesus, as described in the Gospels, sound more reasonable.

[itishappy]

Suit yourself. I personally find it quite wise and generally applicable, and was able to intuit the exact response I was hoping for despite never having completed a read-through of the Tao. (In the first section, no less!)

I find the Tao has a knack for describing my atheist worldview in exactly the way the Bible doesn't. "Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him."

[ozim]

I don’t think it is a bad outcome with misusing a concept.

Because it does not affect those truly embracing it.

Having an excuse is not going to save bad business run by bad people. It might let them slide a bit more but ultimately it is not doing the job for them.

[TimTheTinker]

But it does make it more difficult to talk about a concept when it's been (re)defined and argued about and gaslit about instead of what PaulG is doing: providing a simple definition backed by some real-world examples that actually are founder-mode being done more or less right.

[cutemonster]

Yes, and when various people start to fake-claim that they work in Founder Mode, you're more likely to hire the wrong managers or CEO, once it's time to find someone for whatever reason.

[1290cc]

Literally what the CEO of Snowflake did, by posting a long corporate speak linkedin post everywhere on the web.

[portn0y]

That crucial thing was probably being lucky enough to be born 50 years ago before all the low hanging work we take for granted had been done.

[joquarky]

I just want to write code.

I don't want all the fuss anymore.

It's all just such a mess now.

[darwinawardz]

Write code peacefully,

No more fuss and endless mess,

Mind at ease, clear skies.

[legel]

This haiku response is art.