{"id":44726,"date":"2024-09-05T14:27:06","date_gmt":"2024-09-05T18:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=44726"},"modified":"2024-09-25T15:14:15","modified_gmt":"2024-09-25T19:14:15","slug":"founder-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/05\/founder-mode\/","title":{"rendered":"Founder Mode"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Graham<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

The theme of Brian’s talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.” He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb’s free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who’ve tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it’s up to them to figure out how. But you don’t get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

As he says, if this term catches on it will be misused like “agile.”<\/p>\n\n

Shubhangi Goel<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A prime example of a tech titan embracing founder mode is Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang, who has 60 direct reports and still eats in the company cafeteria<\/a>.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Chesky spoke about how conventional advice on building and scaling up a startup is broken. He said, as he has before<\/a>, that investors and outside managers just don’t have the insights that founders do. He said that splitting companies into organizational chart tiers — isolating founders from anyone but their direct reports — often kills the business.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

There are also notable exceptions to positive founder mode: Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes were both founders who operated with autonomy, then ignominy.<\/p>

On the other hand, Satya Nadella and Tim Cook are both outside managers touted with turning their companies around — in both cases, building on the legacies of strong founders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Tim Cook wasn’t CEO during the Apple turnaround.<\/p>\n\n

See also:<\/p>\n\n