[WoodenChair]

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organizations are structured the way they typically are, he wouldn't have experimented with so many poor (and ultimately failed) governance structures.

It seems like he was looking at his organization through a social lens (democracy, everyone should have a say) from a governance perspective but having it focused through a product lens (the app). That just doesn't mesh well. Social organizations typically have social missions, not products. When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).

He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained.

[Eji1700]

It bothers me that pragmatism and understanding things like business, economics, and the like can often be commingled with being greedy or evil.

Yes there are lots of people who use what they learn to justify shit positions but personally I started learning all these things because in any other endeavor you want to take seriously you learn everything you can about it.

The number of people who mean well but then just try to hope their way through stuff and relearn the same basic principles is sadly much too high.

Hell it doesn’t even have to revolve around moral/societal principles. The number of games I’ve seen that could’ve done better if they understood marketing, business, or even basic competitive balance better (even if so you can make your party game more fun) is huge.

But then again we’ve got this generation speed running “why finance laws and institutions exist” thanks to crypto. I guess the silver lining is people do learn a lot more once they’ve had personal experience with it.

[geocar]

If you meet someone who understand business, it's going to color your opinion of other people who meet who seem to understand business, until you either learn business or die.

That's how all prejudices work: We're wired up to be afraid and anxious and to share (and communicate) our anxieties to our friends and neighbours. We're trying to help.

The thing is, knowledge; business, economics, and so on, probably can be used to help people, but in a lot of peoples' recent memories, it's being used to harm.

I lost a lot of my teen friends when I "went corporate", but thirty years later I'm reconnecting with some of them, because people change, and we can learn to recognise someone will participate in capitalism for lots of reasons that are not so simple as being "greedy" or "evil".

But to me, I think it is simple: Capitalism is almost certainly unavoidable, so the world could be better if more kind people participate well in it than don't!

[cyberrock]

I used to roll my eyes at fictional settings like LotR and Starcraft (Protoss) that pit orthodox/"white" magic versus forbidden/"black" magic, but now I've woken up to see this industry split into such a moral schism in multiple ways. (Aside, of course, from white/gray/black hat hackers, which is more about actions rather than knowledge)

[jrjeksjd8d]

> He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained.

This stuck out to me too. There's nothing more frustrating for the actual leadership than someone with soft power who says they don't want to lead trying to come in and obstruct every decision.

As an armchair quarterback I feel like if he had kept his tinder dry he probably could have gotten some of what he wanted? He could have advocated to head up the casual spin-off app as a small team. Giving a founder who wants to step out of leadership a pet project is a very common way to handle this situation.

Instead it sounds like he got caught up picking fights on every decision and wasted his credibility. Talking to leadership is a skill and part of that skill is packaging things concisely and effectively. Even if the leadership used to be your confounders.

[mmooss]

That's one view of how to structure organizations but hardly the only one. Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well. Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of automotive manufacturing.

My impression is that recent embrace of hierarchy and authority, and rejection of democracy and equality, are tied to a sharp rise in such ideas in politics. It's hard to believe it's coincidence.

And, also maybe not coincidentally, it's inherently conservative to say, 'this is the way it's always been and must be'.

Innovation is a powerful force. The management ideas the parent embraces were once innovations, which met the same response the parent gives to newer innovators.

[Aurornis]

> Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well.

I've worked in several "flat" startups and one big company.

None of them were actually flat. There's always a hierarchy. There's always an understand chain of command.

> Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of automotive manufacturing.

This is a good example of how "flat" companies aren't really flat. Assembly line workers can stop production because the assembly line is part of their job. They can't fire anyone or give their peers raises, though. If you ask anyone in the comapny, they can point to the person who can fire them and can give them raises. That's the hierarchy. It always exists.

[mmooss]

All that says is there is nothing absolute in any way. There are no absolute hierarchies; all have a degree of flatness, of people lower on the hierarchy with more influence than people above them, etc.

[WoodenChair]

Yes, there are degrees of everything. There is cool, kinda cold, cold, very cold. I'm not exactly sure your point? Seems like you are arguing with a straw man. Who said there are not different degrees of flatness or degrees of hierarchy? The previous poster was just saying that there's always some hierarchy, even if it's unwritten, which aligns with "degrees of flatness."

[Earw0rm]

Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread:

Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power.

At their best, flat hierarchies do as described.

At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist.

Humans are complicated, and we do seem to have a certain amount of low-level social wiring for hierarchy and pecking order, even if it's far from absolute.

I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so; large amounts of energy are expended either attempting to belong to that few, or currying favour with them. Power tends to accrue to those most inclined to seize it.

Whereas in a more formal org, people with "manager" in their title are at least subject to a minimum amount of vetting, training and oversight.

TLDR, flat hierarchy can be better than rigid hierarchy, but nominally "flat" hierarchy with power-gradient characteristics can be the worst of both worlds.

[wisty]

Toyota has tonnes of heirarchy.

Their "andon" just means that if anyone suspects a fault, they raise a red flag (old school andon - a literal flag, US companies heard it and made it an app lol) and the line goes down until it's fixed.

This isn't anarchy or even democracy. It's totally standard for anything safety critical, Toyota just treats a flaw in a Corolla engine the same way most people treat airline crashes.

A US carrier group has tonnes of heirarchy but if the lowest ranked person sees loose spanner on the deck the whole thing shuts down instantly.

[PaulHoule]

It is an interesting thing about the best military organizations is that they have hierarchy but also push a lot of responsibility downward. E.g. we don't see anything noble about The Charge of the Light Brigade

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-t...

An infantry platoon does have leaders, it does follow orders, it is the thin edge of a very long wedge, but it has a lived reality of the members improvising under pressure.

[bluGill]

> I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so;

It works at Toyota because the stop button is something you push for specific weird things. You don't push the stop button because you think the Camry should have been designed to fit a big V8.

You push the stop button because you noticed something looks weird that might affect quality. See some rust on a part that normally doesn't have rust - push stop: better to pay the entire factory to stand around doing nothing for two hours while engineers decide that is harmless surface rust than the ship a product that is defective to customers. (this is a real situation - the engineer who decided to use those parts also monitored warranty/repair on those machines for the next few years, in case he was wrong he would have done a recall at first sign of trouble, but those machines didn't have problems any more than others so his decision was verified. I won't name the company)

I would guess the majority of times people hit stop they are eventually told "not a problem but you were right to stop just in case so thank you". There are a few times where hitting stop prevents shipping something that would fail horribly and often the part that would fail isn't visible to inspectors unless they are at the exact spot on the line someone saw it and hit stop.

[mmooss]

Agreed. As another example, many managers say their 'door is open', they welcome negative feedback, etc. Only a few are serious enough about it to understand how to do that (including managing their own emotional response).

> in a more formal org, people with "manager" in their title are at least subject to a minimum amount of vetting, training and oversight.

Often they are people with connections or money, or high technical skill and complete incompetence as a manager. That's one reason people go to flatter structures - the workers do better on their own.

Organizing people toward long-term goals is a challenge. There is no way to make bad performance, incompetent or malicious, into good outcomes; no organizational design will save you.

[tensegrist]

> nominally "flat" hierarchy with power-gradient characteristics can be the worst of both worlds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

[csours]

> I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota,

I've never worked for Toyota, but as far as I can tell they take this very seriously. You can look up a history of NUMMI for a case study

[PunchyHamster]

> At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist.

But that's just how it works in typical normal hierarchy. The normal hierarchy just makes it easier to "pick a target" you need to please

The falling of any, whether formal or flat, is incentive misalignment, if a given structure makes it so screwing other people over so you look better is profitable, it will inevitably happen. And it's really hard to align incentives that way, like how even in "flat" companies often working on new shiny profitable brings more capital (whether social or actual) than maintaining long-term project

> I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so; large amounts of energy are expended either attempting to belong to that few, or currying favour with them. Power tends to accrue to those most inclined to seize it.

The idea that gets lost in the translation is empowering people to put stop to things that can in long term be net loss to company and trusting worker with knowing enough about their job that the power won't be used willy-nilly.

For the idea to work you not only need culture where that won't be shunned by some manager coz it made him miss their KPIs, but also having each worker be competent enough to know where to use the power

[mrguyorama]

You specifically need a culture that considers "Unskilled labor" to be an oxymoron. Where a literal assembly line worker feels like they have enough expertise to say "No, this is a problem worth stopping production over".

American car companies for example have always preferred to just keep the line moving and have a later QA step fix up the problem, or literally push the problem onto the dealer.

You need to treat even your low employees as not replaceable cogs in a machine.

This is the opposite of what American business school culture has taught for decades, which is why Toyota was unable to teach GM how to do what they were doing.

Not only did GM managers not do a good job of respecting their employees, but decades of that lack of respect meant that the employees didn't trust management enough to play along with the system in good faith. Everyone was "Defecting" and it makes everyone worse off.

Yet Japan DOES have a strictly hierarchical work culture, where openly countering something your boss says isn't exactly welcome. So I wonder how this sort of "Trust your employees to have good ideas" thing came about.

[tristor]

> Yet Japan DOES have a strictly hierarchical work culture, where openly countering something your boss says isn't exactly welcome. So I wonder how this sort of "Trust your employees to have good ideas" thing came about.

What happened is that they bought into the Edward Deming viewpoint of Total Quality Control (TQC), and instituted this throughout their business in a way which melded correctly with their culture, ultimately resulting in Kaizen and The Toyota Way. It didn't happen overnight, it happened over a period of about 20-30 years, so that now we think of it as something inherent to Toyota that is not possible to replicate. Because of Toyota's strict commitment at the upper levels and the strict hierarchy of Japanese work culture, once they had committed they expended every necessary effort until the thing was done, which differs from American companies where it's often hard to get folks to even try anything new in the way they approach their work.

[mmooss]

> once they had committed they expended every necessary effort until the thing was done

That's too simplistic to describe the reality of humanity. Whatever Toyota's discipline, it's a matter of degree and they have challenges implementing it.

[Earw0rm]

> But that's just how it works in typical normal hierarchy. The normal hierarchy just makes it easier to "pick a target" you need to please

It means that the org has been intentionally designed with that in mind, so those running it will be aware that this is an operational factor.

> For the idea to work you not only need culture where that won't be shunned by some manager coz it made him miss their KPIs, but also having each worker be competent enough to know where to use the power

And a culture which allows the worker to possess whatever information and context they need in order to exercise that competence effectively. Hiring and training is part of it, sufficiently open information-flow is the other key.

[jorvi]

> At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly how ex-Valve employees describe their workplace.

[Centigonal]

I've heard this about both Valve and Palantir, but they also seem like extremely successful organizations. That's something I really want to understand, because my guess would have been that all the politicking would destroy productivity and hamper decisionmaking.

[cycomanic]

> Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread: > > Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power. > > At their best, flat hierarchies do as described. > > At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist. > > Humans are complicated, and we do seem to have a certain amount of low-level social wiring for hierarchy and pecking order, even if it's far from absolute. > > I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so; large amounts of energy are expended either attempting to belong to that few, or currying favour with them. Power tends to accrue to those most inclined to seize it. > > Whereas in a more formal org, people with "manager" in their title are at least subject to a minimum amount of vetting, training and oversight. > > TLDR, flat hierarchy can be better than rigid hierarchy, but nominally "flat" hierarchy with power-gradient characteristics can be the worst of both worlds.

> Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread: > > Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power. > > At their best, flat hierarchies do as described. > > At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist. >

And that is different from more hierarical organisations how? I mean there are plenty of stories about infiting, thiefdoms, manuvering... in hierarical organisations as well. There's also lots of example we're the disconnect between the top and lower tiers of the hierarchy (i.e. the essence of the hierarchy itself) let to the downfall of the organisation. I also fail to see the connection to the article, the organisation did not seem to have failed (in the view of the author at least), due to the failed "democratic" organisation experiments, but due to the leadership in the current hierarical organisation not listening to the "lower tiers". So if anything it seems to be a problem of the hierarical structure.

> Humans are complicated, and we do seem to have a certain amount of low-level social wiring for hierarchy and pecking order, even if it's far from absolute. >

I dislike these generalised statements about "human nature", there is way too much uncertainty and plenty of counter examples.

That said I agree with some of the other points you made, the post reads a bit weird considering that the author essentially gave up his ability to influence the course of the organisation (both by giving up his leadership seat, but also before by disenganging from the process), and the complains that the organisation did not develop how they wanted.

[Earw0rm]

The difference in a hierarchical org is that the structure is laid out on paper for everyone to see. The power dynamic is explicit rather than implicit.

(At least, it's supposed to be. You do get weird inversions from time to time, when a weak manager is put in charge of a domineering empire-builder, but it's rare - and even in that case, the rest of the org can see the anomaly - as they have a frame of reference to measure it against.)

"Humans are complicated" => that is my uncertainty caveat. We're not absolute-hierarchical nor absolute-flat, in much the same way as we're neither exactly chimp-like nor gorilla-like in terms of monogamy. My observation though (and hardly an original one) is that when we build organisations which try to deny hierarchy, it has a habit of sneaking in thru the back door.

[mmooss]

There are more differences: A formally structured org isn't a flat org with titles attached.

> "Humans are complicated" => that is my uncertainty caveat. We're not absolute-hierarchical nor absolute-flat

yes

> when we build organisations which try to deny hierarchy, it has a habit of sneaking in thru the back door.

The same happens when we try to deny freedom. Empowering everyone, through freedom and universal equality and human rights, is the foundation of the very successful modern world.

As I said upthread, I think the focus on hierarchy and power is really an outgrowth of current anti-democratic politics, even if people don't explicitly think of it that way. That doesn't deny all hierarchy or power - it's a matter of degree: The history of modern democracy is to lean heavily toward individual freedom (for essential moral reasons too).

[hluska]

Perhaps, but the writer removed themselves from leadership. They can have a whole lot of novel or even good ideas but if they’re not in a place to implement them they’re not going to succeed. Leaving leadership was a terrible decision that any business text would have advised against. You can’t beat a hierarchy unless you’re part of it.

[mmooss]

An organization has serious problems, and incompetent leaders, if only leaders' ideas are implemented. (That doesn't necessarily disagree with what you said.)

[PaulHoule]

There is the famous Tyranny of Structureless essay

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

which describes issues that people struggle with to this day. When it comes to activism I think the most effective organizations I've been in have been "structureless" like that with a few people who lead because they are dedicated and have time and energy.

Personally when it comes to structure and the issues Jo talks about the cure (structure) is worse than the disease and once we start talking about Robert's Rules and bylaws and fundraising you are already losing people and going off mission. All the discussions about the perception (and somewhat reality) of "Class X of people is not being represented here" tend to turn into knock-down drag out fights, "Class X" never stepping up, and the ultimate reality of nobody being represented except for Robert and bylaws and fundraising.

It's not to say structureful organizations aren't useful but I would say organizations are basically right-wing in that they embody social hierarchy and if you feel your structureless organization is fun and exciting and making some difference in your bit of the world the way to save it when structure encroaches is to tear it down and start another one.

"Sustainable" groups tend to become what they oppose, structureless groups can seem to come out of nowhere, strike a decisive blow, then melt into the crowd.

[specialist]

The purpose of RRO assumes majoritarianism while ensuring the minority is heard.

As you know, there are light weight versions, for boards and committees. But nothing I'd advocate for product development.

> the most effective organizations

As a fellow recovering activist, you might be interested in Vincent Bevins' If We Burn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn Connected some dots for me. Things I experienced but wasn't smart enough to sus and articulate.

[PaulHoule]

I agree there is more than one way to look at it. There are good points to RRO but I think the legalism drives away a "silent majority" [1] of people who out of their background or temperament are particularly repelled by it.

Over the long term I've seen the governance of organizations like my food co-op be quite complex and not what I thought when things were going on. For instance we had a conflict that boiled for years which looked like a conflict over the vision of the organization but in retrospect it really was the bad personality of the manager because that manager left and went to run Borders [2] and had the same problems over there whereas the conflicting camps reconciled pretty quickly when that manager was out.

But there really are tensions over professionalism, vanguardism, and such that we'll be arguing about for a really long time. The asymmetry between the left and right wings is also interesting -- I think left wing organizations have an unhealthy tendency towards centralization because fundraising is more difficult and you get the "membership organization" model that inevitably fails because of the issues pointed out in [3] [4] vs many right wing millionaires that fund parallel right wing causes that compete in a healthy way and always stay on mission because they can be defunded when they go off mission.

In 2026 I have a new commitment to activism but Jacobin magazine would rip into my approach as being radically apolitical but I think that is what is needed in 2026.

[1] 20 years ago I didn't think I'd be talking like Nixon...

[2] Personally I am not inclined to blame individuals, plus that manager had allies, which is why it took me so long to see it

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

[specialist]

Thanks for recommending Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It's a good compliment to The Logic of Collective Action.

Sad I'm just now learning of it.

--

I've used Jacobin (and such) to reveal my blindspots. Criticisms, from the left, have helped me clarify, understand, and articulate my own positions and beliefs.

As for being apolitical, well... My primary motivator is to "increase the peace" (for brevity's sake). And partisanship hasn't helped much.

FWIW, you might enjoy David Roberts' recent interview with Samuel Bagg.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-cure-for-misinformation-is-not

They explain and articulate some of what I've experienced trying to (re)build relationships with friends and family (with opposing views). Micro dose validation of some stuff I've intuited (this decade past) was a nice dopamine hit.

Like you, I'm focusing my "political" and "activism" energy on building community, doing things. And trying to disengage from the never-ending partisan food fights.

Thanks again. Cheers.

[specialist]

I've used the group coordination technology of democracy in the workplace. It was both awesome and burdensome.

Awesome, because social cognition and personal empowerment are force multipliers.

Burdensome, because change is hard, empowerment means accountability, some people would rather complain than contribute.

I'd never advocate leaderless, flatness, whatever pseudo anarchist mumbo-jumbo. Doesn't work. Tyranny of Structurelessness, If We Burn, and all that.

I threaded the needle by creating an org chart comprised of well defined roles. And (most) every team member served in (most) every role, over time. So the person serving in the QA/Test role dutifully executed the QA/Test playbook. And next release they might represent the Engr, TechSupp, etc role.

Otherwise known as cross training, but with better support and culture.

YMMV, obv. Different efforts require different structures. There's a cornucopia of group decision making tools, skills, techs. Use what works best for the task and context at hand.

--

I'm very intrigued by how Oxide Computers is running things. Just from their podcasts, radically open seems like it's working for them.

[DwnVoteHoneyPot]

He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help.

[teiferer]

And ironically, after going on and on about all the details of those failures, he asks the reader for a job. Does he really think that this overly long text is a good ad for getting people to hire him?

As a potential employer, I already see in front of me the public ranting about what is wrong with my organisation if (or when) he eventually leaves again. Dodged a bullet right there.

[hobofan]

> but he abdicated all the responsibility

He abdicated the responsibility as he from the beginning didn't have any power (always the single dissenting vote). There also isn't much leadership to provide if everyone else in the "leadership circle" is on a different frequency, or otherwise you are just a rogue actor that will quickly get kicked out.

If anything the time for him to leave would have been when he stepped down to be an engineer. I don't think there is anything wrong with laying your reasons for leaving bare, especially when many people will come asking why one of the co-founders left.

[ghaff]

Sometimes it makes sense, if you fundamentally disagree with leadership (or peers who outvote you), it makes sense to just move on. Otherwise they just annoy you and you them. If you've made your case, both parties will be happier apart.

I stepped out of a non-profit board for a time because what was obvious to me needed to happen wasn't going to--although it did over time after my departure and I rejoined at some point.

[EZ-E]

This was my thought too. The author seems very passionate, but I imagine he could be hard to work with.

[lelanthran]

> He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help.

This isn't a personality problem; it's far far worse (or better, depending on your point of view) than that:

FTFA

> We hired two new staff to work on it, and did our best to reconcile what little guidance we got from Leadership with an internal process focused on discussion and consent. By late 2024, the app wasn’t what anyone wanted it to be,

Yup, no surprises there.

> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion,

> how much to disclose in our negotiations with CAS (IMO everything) or whether board members should be required to donate money (IMO no, plutocracy is bad at all times and at all levels)

> I tried to do what seemed like the only thing I could do in a hierarchy

> Accepting a grant without any consultation with staff about how its obligations might be met

...

> Since the exodus, Leadership has improved on some fronts [...] They hired three new engineers for the mobile team that seem both experienced and enthusiastic.

Well, a large grant will let you do that :-/

It seems to me that the problem was not one of personality, but of ideology.

Personality is deeply embedded in humans, ideology is merely adopted.

Author's ideology differed from that of leadership. His personality is probably irrelevant.

[Sharlin]

The iNaturalist app is incidental, merely a means to an end – an end that's fundamentally social in nature. Like Wikipedia. The software merely enables the mission. This is his (very valid) viewpoint, I believe.

[duxup]

My anecdotal experience with folks who gravitate towards ideas about unstructured organizations (of any kind) ... also very much expect the output of that organization will just naturally be what they want.

I sometimes wonder how their personal mental human simulator works in those cases as to me it is obvious that such an org will (among a lot of other things) not necessarily output what I want or even be predictable.

That's not a knock on the author, I appreciate the article.

[miningape]

> My anecdotal experience with folks who gravitate towards ideas about unstructured organizations (of any kind) ... also very much expect the output of that organization will just naturally be what they want

Got that exact impression from this article. No doubt the leadership has issues, but I also get the feeling he wouldn't have been happy with this direction even if a group elected it - although, to his credit, it sounds like he probably would've stuck with it longer.

Also not knocking the author, I hope he finds something more fulfilling to work on - and he's probably awesome to work with.

[patcon]

I agree that I can see plainly that he wasn't interested in certain ways of running the organization, but also...

Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures -- we certainly don't condemn the very idea of hierarchy or capitalism.

But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me

[WoodenChair]

First, I'll just say I think the iNaturalist app is great and I've used it before and enjoyed it.

I assume he had good intentions when experimenting with non-hierarchical governance, but this wasn't the right organization with which to experiment with them. If it was feeding the poor, maybe "sociocracy" makes sense. But its main goal was to make an app (and although it's a non-profit it maintains a proprietary machine learning model mind you, this isn't Wikipedia).

And when you make an app you need direction. You can't be going in 5 different major directions based on individual contributors' whims. And beyond even just the structural issues, he also needed basic leadership/management skills to direct the product which he didn't provide. "Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative."

So he was a director who didn't direct. Then later on when he chose to step down from being a leader, he decided he wanted to direct again. Isn't that ironic?

As far as can we criticize? Of course we can. If someone's going to write a public essay calling out other people by name and criticizing them we can criticize their essay and what they wrote about their experience.

[patcon]

thanks for reading my message in good faith :)

as someone who co-founded a non-hierarchical community[1] (that's still going strong after a decade of weekly events), co-founded a worker cooperative[2], and experimented with sociocracy (and ALSO fully admit I failed out of it for reasons of misalignment!) -- i just think we owe it to ourselves to not discount that certain things XY can't be built under system Z. There are many ways possible where leaders don't always direct, or maybe only direct in short spurts. This all-or-nothing, lead-from-the-front, only-way-through-is-up perspective of getting things done (and working together), it's not the only way possible :) (respectfully!)

[1]: https://civictech.ca/

[2]: https://hypha.coop/

[WoodenChair]

Looks like cool stuff, cheers. Always interesting to learn about new ways of organizing. The great thing is if the world is free enough we can all experiment with different structures if others will agree to experiment with us. But these do sound like they fall into the social side of the dichotomy of social focused versus product focused that I mentioned. The author of the post was trying to be in both at the same time which I think is hard to do.

[jszymborski]

(I love Hypha. I'm an early member of CoSocial which you folks kindly call home on the fediverse :) )

While I'm open to the idea that "certain things XY can't be built under system Z", I think that this feels like one of those things that should be no?

My question re: non-profit co-op-ey things is usually "can this thing run sustainably by enriching users" rather than the usual "can this thing run sustainably by enriching shareholders".

A super low-overhead social network for ecology feels like it could easily fit that bill. Lots of democratically run social networks running today to attest to that.

[n8agrin]

With full respect to your right to criticize, I don't understand what differentiates an organization trying to build a social networking app around biodiversity data from an organization feeding the poor, and those organizations' ability to experiment with their governance system. Can you expand that thought or is it rhetorical?

[nkmnz]

One thing that comes to my mind is the question about what you actually want to achieve, expressed by what outcome you want to measure. In the case of „feeding the poor“, that’s relatively easy: people fed, calories distributed, maybe also health indicators and sociographic factors of the people you reach. For any app, that might be much harder: total installations? Total usage? New downloads? Additional funding raised? Feature X vs. feature Y? You can absolutely bring the „feeding the poor“ to the same level of complexity by involving politics and trying to scale to multiple locations and cities. So maybe the difference is in scale, not in technology vs. non-technology.

[WoodenChair]

I mean I think there's a pretty stark difference between a charity feeding the poor and an app startup (even a non-profit one). So stark that it feels almost weird writing this comment, but I'll take your question at face value. Okay, here's a few:

- Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are likely less controversial and binary in nature than decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, as long as more people are getting fed, it's probably fine as long as it's not chaos. In a product-focused organization you need to make binary decisions: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Somebody ultimately has to be the decider on these binary decisions. They cannot all be bottom-up decisions if you want to have a cohesive vision for the product.

- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government. People who work for a charity or a government are more likely to be motivated by the common good. So they don't need as much extrinsic motivation from leadership. An app startup, even a non-profit one (which I guess can be technically a charity), is going to have workers who are also motivated by money (yes even if it's a non-profit, they have other high paying options), technical decisions, and sure the mission too. I have a couple friends who have hopped around between non-profit software organizations due to these non-mission reasons. Corralling those motivations often requires a different management mindset than working with people who are just happy to be there.

- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government and you therefore probably need to answer to your donors or voters. You need full transparency. This was an app startup, albeit a non-profit one. It doesn't really answer to anyone except who it gets grants from and even then is not fully transparent/open (has a proprietary machine learning model).

These are just a few but do you really think any governance structure can just be applied to any organization? They're not all compatible.

[n8agrin]

I think an organization's governance structure being successful has more to do with how the people in the organization want to be governed than whether it's building an app or feeding the poor.

[vtbassmatt]

None of this matches my experience as a board member and officer at a nonprofit, nor what I observe with my partner who has worked at multiple nonprofits.

I don’t understand the distinction you’re drawing between “charity” and “nonprofit”. iNaturalist is a 501c3, so it’s a charity [1]. One of my partner’s previous 501c3 employers produced an app to aid with their mission.

Let me reframe your first bullet to reflect my lived experience (both in the nonprofit world and building software at a for-profit):

> Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are high-stakes and often controversial compared with decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, the scarce budget won’t stretch to cover the needs of the mission. In a product-focused organization, decisions are much lower stakes. Through the magic of version control, A/B testing, and vendor app stores, you rarely need to commit deeply to decisions, so the individual developer can make the initial call: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Ship, learn, iterate.

My for-profit employer explicitly hires for (or at least used to) “passion” and intrinsic motivation. And there are several corporations I’m not willing to work for despite their reputation for high compensation. I think it’s pretty tenuous to connect org structure with motivation so directly and concretely.

The third bullet is uninformed. 501c3s answer to the people they derive funding from, their customers/clients/served population, their board, and the government (tax authority) whether they’re putting spaghetti on plates or pixels on screens. The IRS has a pretty readable intro to the requirements [2].

This kind of first-principles reasoning from vibes about what it must be like is seductive but often misleading. I encourage everyone I can to serve on a nonprofit board. The organizations can usually benefit from the perspective and different type of thinking that computer people bring, and it’ll open your eyes to new perspectives about your own work and life!

[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/921296468

[2] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

[teiferer]

He is not being criticized for talking about his fuckups but for ranting endlessly about how other people were not doing what he wanted, putting the blame squarely on them.

[sdwr]

It's a classic problem when someone reaches the edge of their competence, but still cares about success. They don't see anything they can do differently, and the focus becomes how other people are (apparently) screwing up.

[AlexeyBelov]

Does not seem like a rant to me, just a description on what happened and when / how. What parts seem ranty?

[lelanthran]

> But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me

In that might tome of an essay, where did he tal about how he fucked up? I read the whole thing and it is clear to me that he doesn't think he fucked up.

[mnky9800n]

To me, not considering how I contributed to the problem is always a place to look for fuck ups.

[Aurornis]

> Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures

Celebrating failures has become a very confusing concept. When someone shares their stories of trying and failing, the part we're celebrating is that they tried something. We're not celebrating the failure or validating everything they did.

The value in sharing failure stories is that others can learn from them. The person sharing the failure story also gets valid feedback.

If everyone just rolled over and applauded everything that led up to the failure, that's not helpful to anyone. It may feel good for some, but it's really unhelpful. Evaluating the situation and what went wrong is important.

The second aspect is a desire for "blameless" postmortems where we all pretend like the human element was not a factor to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. However, in cases like this, the human factor appears to be at the root of a lot of the discord. I don't think it's unfair at all to discuss that honestly.

[Aurornis]

> He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction.

I've gone back and forth between IC and management. Giving up the influence of being in management can be hard. If you don't agree with management's direction, it's even harder.

Hiring former managers into IC positions can be risky for this reason. A lot of former managers who switch to IC roles are amazing because they understand the management perspective and they're happy to be able to do their job without the responsibility and accountability (and meetings!) of a management role.

The risk is that you get someone who desires all of the control of being in management without the responsibility and accountability. When someone gives up management responsibilities and obligations but still wants to drive the organization, like the vibes I'm getting from this post, it's not going to end well.

[rPlayer6554]

Could you recommend any book in particular?

[WoodenChair]

One that would've helped is "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" which is a collection of interviews with startup founders by Jessica Livingston. Even though this was a non-profit it effectively sounds like it was a tech startup (he was building an app that was based on, at the time (late 2000s), cutting edge machine learning technology). I think by hearing other founders' stories building other tech products, he would've learned about how they structured their organizations and led their teams. I liked the book personally, but the interviews will be hit or miss depending on the participant.

Here's the book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3N47TG3

Here's a podcast summary of it: https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/1127af729a0d4aec/foun...

But frankly even just a basic textbook or video course on leadership/management would've helped or something like High Output Management by Andy Grove (Amazon https://amzn.to/3NCAZME, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/095f226633d34496/high...).

In terms of dealing with all of the personal conflict between team members, Radical Candor may have helped (Amazon https://amzn.to/4qNa7bf, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/938d044a/radical-cand...).

[pbhjpbhj]

Why not a book about making co-operatives work, or managing direction in non-hierarchical orgs, management structure in public interest companies/charities, or establishing scientific organisations?

It sounds like he learnt lessons about the need for inclusion of users, need for strong information flow, what doesn't work (from his perspective) in hierarchy.

[justincormack]

I read Maverick by Ricardo Semmler a long time ago and loved it about non hierarchy in business. Must re read it

[0xbadcafebee]

SV tech startups are an incredibly niche form of business, nobody should base their thinking on general management around them alone. They function within an ecosystem designed for them, like plants that only grow in a rainforest.

Most management books that most people recommend are not based on scientific evidence, studies, academic literature, etc. They're mostly memes; relatively recent books written by some kind of famous person, benefiting from the heuristics that make people favor the famous, successful, or high status [regardless of the fact that their lessons are usually from one source, type of company, culture, etc]. Compare that to practical management books based on evidence and studies; they're boring and old, or simply not catchy or sexy, so nobody recommends them.

There's also books that some people know about, and have a good track record, yet nobody follows. Deming's books should be mandatory reading for anyone in management, and anyone who cites Toyota as a model should absolutely have read them. But good luck finding anyone who actually follows the advice (same for Ackoff, Goldratt, Senge, Jacques, etc). Likely they are just too complicated and most people are not smart enough to manage this way.

[isaacfrond]

What's your recommendation for 'some basic business books'?

[doctorpangloss]

> When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).

you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

[rvba]

Mozilla the one which:

* lost market share of its product from 30 to 2%

* spends money on fun projects and acqusitions that generate no revenue, while taking away what the users wanted (addons, extensions, customizing) since supposedly this is hard to do

* spends money on politics instead of core product

And many more

You should read a business book too. Focusing on core product (firefox) should be top priority, especially if it is the only real product that generates revenue.

Soon music will stop and there will be no money, since it got spent on everything else.

[bluGill]

The problem is Mozilla's mission is not to develop a browser! They have a browser, and it is what everyone knows them for, but their mission is only vaguely related to the browser. I don't care much about their mission - there are plenty of other charities that have similar missions if I did. I care about a great browsers and they are not delivering that - which is fine as far as their mission, but I'm miffed because I can't get what I want from anyone.

[mrguyorama]

What do business books say you should do when the primary way you lose your market is illegal and anti-competitive business practices from a megacorp in a political environment anathema to punishing anti-competitive business practices?

Please tell me how Firefox was supposed to compete with Chrome being bundled with nearly any download of any software anywhere, and with a one click installer on the Google homepage. The value of that advertising alone far exceeds what Mozilla could afford.

People who think it's Mozilla's failure to have been utterly crushed by illegal business practices are so strange to me.

What did you expect to happen? Why do you think we have laws against this stuff in the first place? How would you have outspent the behemoth on advertising? How would you have overcome a competitor being included with nearly everything done on a computer?

Google Chrome's abuse of installers was so bad that Microsoft had to change how it sets "default browser" because Google was setting itself as the default entirely without user interaction! Tons of the marketshare that went from Firefox to Chrome did not do so intentionally, did not even know, and did not mean to

[rvba]

It's funny, because Firefox gained dominant market share in a time when Internet was much younger and Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows.

However Firefox offered something that IE did not have - extensions and customization, so those "in the know" popularized it. Especially abilty to block ads spread as word of mouth.

Then the "in the know" people would install Firefox and recommend it (for free!) to their family and friends.

Now we are in time when Google creates various "manifests" that are a fancy way of saying that they want to cut on ad-blocks in Chrome... so it would be Firefox time to shine again. What do they do? Their CEO (previous one) says that they dont want adblocks and could in fact get rid of them! So opposite of what made Firefox popular in the first place!

Then on top of that they developers of firefox have a big internal problem: they dont want to do what users want (ability to make addons, extensions and customize thing). They dont want to do that because it is "hard". They want to do greenfield projects that nobody is interested in. Note that those developers dont write Firefox for free, they earn good salaries. But management lets them do what they want.

The differentiator for Firefox were extensions - but those were killed, because the team did not want to support them

Business book will ask you "what is the unique proposition of Firefox" - it was adblock now and they want to kill even this.

[cyberrock]

That argument is a lot less convincing now that Brave (by their previous CTO) has seen exponential growth the last few years while Firefox has just cruised. It turns out Firefox just kinda sucks.

[sehansen]

I think WoodenChair's claim is that Mozilla has been organized as a social organization, which has probably been quite good for the philanthropy side. But it doesn't seem to have been particularly good for the product side, as seen from the decline in market share and perceived quality of Firefox. At least perceived quality in the eyes of techies here on HN.

[WoodenChair]

> you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.

- The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...

- Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox...

- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)

I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."

[sehansen]

Organizations in decline often have to pay above market rate for executives, so it's hard to say that it's definitely too much. Especially when Mozilla spends ~$280,000 on software development, i.e. 40 times as much. Even paying the CEO $0 wouldn't really move the needle.

But, yeah, Mozilla has been fumbling constantly for the past decade, at least.

[glenstein]

If success was really determined by a pitch perfect combination of browser development, catering to users with features they most want, being ahead of the curve on mobile and devices, and being flexible and creative with financing.... then we would all be using Opera.

Back when memory management actually was critical, Opera had a light footprint, had a portable executable you could stick on a USB stick. They partnered with mobile vendors to get on phones very early (ahead of the iPhone!), had advanced tabs, an extensions ecosystem, "widgets", Unite (the most impressive browser idea ever imo even to this day), had clearer ideas of what the start page could be, offered to retrieve compressed pages to save data (again back when that mattered), built in ad blocking very early on, and an extremely customizeable user interface

But even they had to give up on Presto (RIP), sold the company to overseas investors, shared user data with ad brokers and develop based on Chromium. If doing everything right is what works, then what happened to Opera?

[auggierose]

Just out of interest, how much should the guaranteed salary of a non-profit CEO maximally be?

[WoodenChair]

I don't know but $7 million seems high for a non-profit that's in the midst of layoffs, dramatically losing marketshare, seems to have no direction, and has all of the other failures I mentioned above as Mozilla did in 2023. But point taken, without looking at a scale of other people in similar non-profit positions, it's hard to judge. I think the other points are strong though.

[Hendrikto]

Guaranteed? Enough to cover living costs.

Everything else should be performance bonuses. Of which Mozilla CEO would have gotten none, based on their failure.

[auggierose]

How would you measure the performance, given that it is a non-profit? Which self-respecting CEO who is actually good would go for such a deal? I think it is important to understand that the employees of a non-profit are allowed to earn a proper salary.

I think $7 million is too much for the CEO of a non-profit, but $100K would be too low. You can see that there are plenty of CEOs making more than $1 million: https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages...

[PunchyHamster]

Successful retirement home for failing CxOs maybe but as company Mozilla was successful 15 years ago then managed to completely squander their market lead while eroding public trust in them by various weird partnerships (like multiple times installing 3rd party addons without consent)

[thaumasiotes]

> Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience.

Do you have any recommendations for business books about effective management / leadership?

[GrowingSideways]

> Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here,

If they had something to contribute they would have figured a label to slap on

[dr_dshiv]

Do share book recommendations, please.

[WoodenChair]

See the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550083

[hibikir]

IMO, the difficulty with your typical business book is practical application: I've spent way too much time over my career trying to explain to leadership at different levels how they were acting in ways opposite to the very books they had on their desks. In one very high profile case, even the book they wrote!

Leadership comes down to Feynman's first principle: You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.