[thntk]

It's not founder mode or manager mode. I think it is just about effective management.

When starting up, the founder needs to (1) know what should be done, (2) be able to do it themself, and (3) do it and confirmed it's done. When scaling up, the founder still needs to (1) know what should be done, (2') know who are able to do it, and (3') arrange for those to do it and confirm it's done.

What is called manager mode is just a failure in either (1), (2) or (3). And what is called founder mode is just trying to remedy such failures by exerting themself instead of fixing the structure, thus, also not effective.

[narnarpapadaddy]

I agree with this. In my experience, if your "good people" are running your business into the ground, you just didn't hire good people. The challenge is that hiring "good people" is incredibly difficult. It's also actually fairly hard to get released once onboard. If the company is in the black, even if growth is far below where a founder or investor wants to be, stakeholders are reluctant to make changes.

Baseball recruiters have the advantage that they can go watch a pitcher toss a few balls. For most roles in a company you can't get that direct knowledge of someone's skills prior to hiring. After hiring someone who is actually an expert needs to sit with the new hire and assess them critically.

As a founder, sit in the first several meetings with the new sales guy. Did they come prepared knowing who to talk to? What their budget likely was? What their pain points likely were? Did they hear what the client asked and respond accordingly? Or did they did misunderstand the domain, need, request, etc.? Did they leave with notes and follow-up items? If you didn't come away impressed release them and move on. After 3 or 5 meetings you'll have confidence that they are the right fit.

After that, let them do their job and move on to addressing the next challenge. Once someone has shown themselves to be a good hire, protect them.

[halfcat]

> After that, let them do their job and move on

Yes, for the most part. But also: trust but verify

Figure out how much time you can spend on re-verifying, and do it in a random sampling basis. This will look different depending on the roles, but it’s whatever you need to do to verify, first-hand, the job is still being done correctly.

This will likely be a very small percent of your time, but the key is that it needs to be non-zero.

[abhinai]

Have you ever run a company or are you just sharing opinions based on what you “think” should be done?

[narnarpapadaddy]

I have founded and “exited” 3 startups, 2 of which ended in bankruptcy. :)

[baxtr]

I’m afraid the whole piece is missing a framework like yours.

It looks very selectively at one successful category of enterprises and then generalizes this onto all.

But:

What about all those founder mode companies that went terribly wrong?

What about all the companies that function well in “non-founder” mode? Apple today is a perfect example.

I don’t think it’s about founder/non-founder either but about some underlying fundamental principles that PG hasn’t figured out yet.