[swyx]

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.

[causal]

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.

[dvt]

> 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.

[octopoc]

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.

[rgbrgb]

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.

[carabiner]

Bezos also said, "When the anecdotes disagree with the data, it's usually the anecdotes that are right"

[robenkleene]

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".

[godelski]

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."

[concerndc1tizen]

The two charts are basically identical except for Uber's last 6 months...

[debit-freak]

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.