[Waterluvian]

People like Paul seem to have just so much to say about startups for such a long time that at some point it starts to feel like they’re coming up with stuff to have things to keep saying.

The binary state is too simplistic. But it is largely the hook to make the post attractive and successful.

[tbe-stream]

It matches the popular sentiment among some engineers that professional management is useless or even harmful.

[AnimalMuppet]

Not exactly.

Let's say I'm a founder. I am one with the vision of what we're trying to build. Can a professional manager do that better than I can? Can he/she make the calls about what's in or out of scope, or what the architecture needs to be, better than I can? No and no.

So it's not that professional management is harmful, just that it's worse than the founder can do.

And in a startup, that's likely true. But founders don't scale, and there comes a point in the growth of a company where it quits being true.

[sanderjd]

You may be right about the answer for any individual decision, but for the universe of all decisions, the answers are yes and yes, because any decision is better than no decision, and a culture where only the founder's decisions are good enough is a culture that has a massive bottleneck in its ability to make decisions.

[AnimalMuppet]

It depends on three things: how fast the founder can make decisions, how fast the managers can make decisions, and how many total decisions there are to make.

Founders often can make decisions more quickly than managers. They can also revisit decisions more quickly than managers. If the company is small, the founders can be a win - especially with higher-quality decisions.

[sanderjd]

> how fast the founder can make decisions

This is just another way of saying that the decisions of founders are not strictly better. Even if it's stipulated that founders always make better decisions given the same time constraints, their advantage will dwindle quickly as they become more time constrained.

> They can also revisit decisions more quickly than managers.

Why? This seems very unclear to me... I would intuitively say the exact opposite. Founders seem far more likely to make a decision, move on, and never think about that particular thing again.

To use a concrete example. Say a founder makes a key hire, essentially unilaterally, but to a position that does not report directly in to them. Who is more likely to notice and revisit that decision if the person isn't working out, the founder who hired them or the manager (and team) who is working with them day to day? It's the manager, clearly. The founder has done their part, they've brought in a key person, they're off focused on something totally different, as they should be, they have no idea how this person is working out.

[sanderjd]

I may be wrong - I haven't done a survey or anything - but my sense is that age (or experience) divide on this, the more I appreciate management.

Even mediocre management is pretty good, but good management is great.

[nick3443]

I feel this but how many long term successful companies exist with no professional management folks? Beyond Valve, are there more than a few existence proofs?

[paulryanrogers]

I'd say Valve isn't even that successful at managing. IMO they lucked into a huge market demand and did a competent job. Yet haven't managed to produce HL3 after several attempts. There are also some horror stories from former employees of a shadow hierarchy and popularity contests.

[tbe-stream]

My impression: there are very few and for good reasons.